More Elections Have Consequence

While Joe Biden's economic team (renominating Jerome Powell, Janet Yellen, etc.) and the foreign relations team (Blinken, Austin, Nuland, etc.) have not been good, those in the areas of consumer protection and antitrust have been pretty good, and none have been better than  Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who just proposed a rule that would require vendors to make canceling a service just as easy as signing up.

As it stands right now, you click, "Yes," on a website, and in order to terminate, you have to call an always busy phone line, to get an address to send a letter to request a meeting, and at that meeting they say, "If you don't mind leaving a blood-sample, and a piece of skin off the back of the scalp just here, it's just for identification, you can't be too careful."

Lina Khan wants people to be able to terminate service just as easily as they sign up:

Canceling a subscription should be just as easy as signing up for the service, the Federal Trade Commission said in a proposed "click-to-cancel" rule announced today. If approved, the plan "would put an end to companies requiring you to call customer service to cancel an account that you opened on their website," FTC commissioners said.

The FTC said the click-to-cancel rule would require sellers "to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up," and "go a long way to rescuing consumers from seemingly never-ending struggles to cancel unwanted subscription payment plans for everything from cosmetics to newspapers to gym memberships."

………

"The proposal states that if consumers can sign up for subscriptions online, they should be able to cancel online, with the same number of steps. If consumers can open an account over the phone, they should be able to cancel it over the phone, without endless delays," FTC Chair Lina Khan wrote.

………

The proposed rule requires a simple cancellation mechanism for any medium in which a consumer signs up for a service, including Internet, telephone, mail, and in-person. It says:

On the Internet, this "Click to Cancel" provision requires sellers, at a minimum, to provide an accessible cancellation mechanism on the same website or web-based application used for sign-up. If the seller allows users to sign up using a phone, it must provide, at a minimum, a telephone number and ensure all calls to that number are answered during normal business hours. Further, to meet the requirement that the mechanism be at least as simple as the one used to initiate the recurring charge, any telephone call used for cancellation cannot be more expensive than the call used to enroll (e.g., if the sign-up call is toll-free, the cancellation call must also be toll-free). For a recurring charge initiated through an in-person transaction, the seller must offer the simple cancellation mechanism through the Internet or by telephone in addition to, where practical, the in-person method used to initiate the transaction.

The Republican on the FTC finds this necessarily burdensome, because the rights of businesses to screw their customers is a law handed down by the almighty himself, except of course for TikTok.

I am rather surprised that Biden chose so well with Ms. Khan.