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by BytesAndGears 541 days ago
As-is, it works very well in California. I had never experienced the resistance you imagined during the 3-4 years I lived in California, and regularly cancelled subscriptions that were notoriously hard in other states
1 comments

California passed the click to cancel law this year. They passed a different law trying to make it easier to cancel subscriptions in 2018. The need for them to revisit it implies that the original one wasn't working.

Corporations act strategically. They typically don't immediately thwart new laws because the coalition that passed them is still intact and would try to do something about it. So they wait a minute, maybe take the time to buy some more legislators, before testing the fences again.

If people have forgotten about them by then you lose, and if people haven't forgotten about them by then, California passes the 2024 law and you lose the other way. Because they pass the new law in addition to rather than instead of the old one, even though the old one has stopped working, so you have a ratchet of ever-increasing compliance costs that also apply to all the companies that were never doing anything wrong to begin with but still have to hire lawyers to evaluate their activities against an entire bookshelf of rules to see if any of them require something they're not doing.