> It's outrageous that companies in the modern day and age can just elect to make cancellation difficult or impossible and keep taking money from yo
I'm not sure you read the story. A small claims judge would make short work of that situation wherein they will inform Spectrum that they do not want this to go to jury.
However, this story is about a guy getting a resubscription extortion letter in light of a non-existent debt. Might as well be a foreign Prince scam because there are no damages.
I'm not sure you're familiar with how the "you can't cancel" trick works.
The situation in TFA is what happens if you try to escalate an ignored cancellation request by stopping payment. The company graciously extends debt to cover the service that you surely didn't intend to cancel, and when your balance -- augmented by late fees, of course -- has grown to be worth their while, they try to collect.
Variations on this theme exist. Sometimes you take a less than completely active role in the sign-up process and only learn about it on collection. Sometimes you "successfully" cancel and they just fail to process it. The common theme here is ongoing transactions for ongoing service (that isn't actually delivered) in the absence of ongoing consent. It's dysfunctional that we allow this in any form, regardless of whether the form in TFA is slightly less dysfunctional or slightly more dysfunctional than the most common form, which is what I structured my comment around.
If subscription services had to register with your credit card, credit reporting agencies, or some authority that gave you a (complete!) list and a cancel button, all of these problems would go away, along with the awful business models that they enable.
Oh, I'm familiar. Lots of people are familiar. This is a question of tort law wrapped in corporate sponsored "mandatory mediation", which never rules in your favor or delays. I am asserting that while the dispute is small it can be quickly resolved because the court is happy to mediate immediately regardless of the contractual body appointed.
It's when you exceed the small claims or wait, ie you're afraid to go to court or are lapse in monitoring your own finances, that the problem accelerates out of control.
I know what you mean. Long ago, I got Speakeasy when they had a great reputation. At some point, they turned into Megapath, but service seemed okay... at least until I tried to cancel.
I filled out their form online and went through the dance to cancel, but never got any confirmation. Only a couple months later did I hear from them, because my credit card had expired.
I had to make a deal with them to process my cancellation before paying the remainder of the bill. Strangely, it worked instantly when I was on the phone with the rep. Go figure?
It is outrageous, but the blame doesn't lie with companies doing precisely what companies are intended to due, the fault lies solely with politicians who reliably fail to put their voters interest above that of their donors.
Companies are intended to extort money from former customers based on real and implied threats? What is the claim here? Are you saying for profit companies are inherently parasitic and politicians need to pass specific regulations to prevent every instance of bad corporate behavior? Or is it that politicians have created systems that makes companies acting antisocially inevitable? Or is it that companies have made adequate enough campaign contributions to have politicians look the other way?
The obvious claim is that companies will (and should) use any legal means to profit. If we don't want a certain behavior from a company we should elect people who support passing laws to regulate those activities. As has been done for generations.
But to pretend companies should just act like we want is ridiculous.
The law and profit motive aren’t the only things guiding company behavior.
Those factors are very dominant, but I don’t think that is the whole story. Companies are composed of individuals, and individuals have complex reasons for their behavior,
much more than simply not going to jail and making money.
But there absolutely are people at companies who choose not to do bad things, or to even stop doing something bad the company was already doing, that cost the company some immediate profit, despite the fact that there wasn’t a regulation forcing them to make that choice.
This happens. People aren’t economic robots.
Maybe you want to argue that this happens such a small percentage of the time that it isn’t worth considering. Or that it isn’t practical or robust to rely on this dynamic if we wish to reduce systemic bad behavior by companies. Those are different and more reasonable claims, in my mind.
My hunch is that this is an important fact about the world that we shouldn’t discount entirely. But I do agree regulations are very important. And I’m not sure the best way to make use of the dynamic I’m describing.
I'm not sure you read the story. A small claims judge would make short work of that situation wherein they will inform Spectrum that they do not want this to go to jury.
However, this story is about a guy getting a resubscription extortion letter in light of a non-existent debt. Might as well be a foreign Prince scam because there are no damages.