This is what happens when you don't have consumer rights protection.

E.g. Paid for ad-free OTT viewing but commercials ‘appeared after a month’, man wins Rs 9,500 ( https://indianexpress.com/article/legal-news/paid-ad-free-ot... ):

> Calling it a deficiency in service, the Hyderabad consumer commission ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499 and pay compensation to a subscriber after it introduced advertisements midway into his paid ad-free subscription.

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an0malous 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, if you want the root cause: this is what happens when your society is predicated on perpetual growth. Everything would collapse if we just left good things alone, so instead we’re stuck either innovating and creating new good things or squeezing the juice out of what already exists.

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izacus 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This has nothing with perpetual growth and everything with training your population to defend these practices with "oh, they're just companies, don't use it if you don't like it!" instead of fighting back.

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voakbasda 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Vigilante justice, you say? Now you are talking!! We certainly are not going to see things get better on their own, and the government definitely isn’t going to take the side of consumers.

	▲	ion_trapper 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Bring out the guillotines! Mickey Mouse is a human right!
	▲	izacus 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		My government does it a lot.

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tkdb 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure consumer rights protections would deliver better experiences.

Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.

We are seeing an increasingly exaggerated cycle that goes like this: 1. Innovation takes huge investment to launch 2. Early adopters enjoy amazing new product(s) while companies bear losses 3. Companies eventually must face debt so quality of products decrease and price increases

OpenAI and Anthropic have perhaps set the record for going from 1 to 2 in the biggest (financially) and fastest manner ever, and we are all hurtling towards step 3 with a possible too-big-to-fail scenario.

Back to Disney Plus: I don't have a sagely answer. Free markets do sometimes need government to curb monopoly power, and Disney is certainly has a sort of monopolistic power due to their huge portfolio of franchises and content.

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peezd 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.

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Generally true but there have been a lot of examples demonstrating the opposite.

The NPS (and Reacreation.gov) does an amazing job considering their resource level, NASA arguably delivered innovation at an unprecedented scale for decades, and up until it was purposefully fucked with the US Postal Service offered a fantastic dependable, affordable and pretty innovative product. The Hold Mail is simple and elegant as just one minor example.

	▲	Groxx 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Given how ridiculously inefficient (i.e. extractive) private companies are in areas which were previously government run... yea I think at this point there might be stronger evidence that private companies are MUCH slower and less efficient. They can move faster at times, but they often do so with outrageously clear malicious intent, so that isn't exactly something to congratulate them for.

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serioussecurity 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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