Posted by LorenDB 3 days ago
Translation: "WTF, how dare you suggest that we have to stop deceiving and ripping off our customers? We aren't prepared to do business honestly! This is an outrage!"
Note: California has this same type of law scheduled to go into effect in July. Can't wait!
As near as I can tell, that's the real rub here - this is not a law,, nor was it directly enacted by legislation. It's a regulation written independent of lawmakers, and the question is whether the FTC has the authority to write this specific set of regulations.
I'm hoping the cable companies lose but we should be aware of the consequences of allowing uncheck regulatory rule making outside the scope of congress.
Edit: I know in general it's the left who "likes to regulate things" but a relevant example on the right would include regulating things like immigration.
IMO that problem can be traced back to issues like:
1. The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 which prevented adding more Representatives as population grew.
2. The game-theoretic outcomes of continuing to use plurality/first-past-the-post voting.
3. How most officeholders end up spending most of their time raising money for re-election rather than the job itself.
With a magic wand I’d massively increase both the house and senate, publicly fund elections, and switch to 3 member mixed districts to increase the chances every citizen of a district has someone they feel reasonably represents their major views.
I’m not saying it’s worse than what we have now, I’m actually more curious how the people who would like to see that reform would want it to look in practice so I can know whether I could support it and how I’d argue for it.
When I’ve pictured this it’s with member counts in the low to mid thousands, not tens of thousands.
Floor debates are already mainly performative, with little bearing on changes to bills. All the real work happens in committee and by the Speaker’s office. I’d think about embracing this with more different caucuses of various members who come together on specific issues and bring versions of bills and amendments for committees to adopt or reject, maybe even a few levels of committees to build consensus slowly so the final floor vote is more formality than debate.
Here's the Congressional passed statutes regarding the FTC [1].
In particular note that 15 U.S.C 41-58 includes that the FTC "is empowered... to .. prescribe rules defining with specificity acts or practices that are unfair or deceptive, and establishing requirements designed to prevent such acts or practices" among many other similar things.
The phrase "unfair or deceptive" occurs 56 times in the FTC charter. Go read it.
> The FTC's highly prescriptive proposal requiring numerous disclosures, multiple consents and specific cancellation mechanisms is a particularly poor fit for our industry. Our members offer services in a variety of custom bundles. They're provided over a wide range of devices and platforms. Consumers, for example, frequently subscribe to a triple play bundle that includes cable, broadband and voice services. They may face difficulty and unintended consequences if they want to cancel only one service in the package.
> The proposed simple click-to-cancel mechanism may not be so simple when such practices are involved. A consumer may easily misunderstand the consequences of canceling and it may be imperative that they learn about better options. For example, canceling part of a discounted bundle may increase the price for remaining services. When canceling phone service, a consumer needs to understand they will lose 9-1-1 or lifeline services as well. Especially important, low-income consumers could be deprived of lower-cost plans and special government programs that would allow their families to keep broadband service.
I mean, except for the 9-1-1 point, I guess I feel like all of those policies -- the bundling in particular -- should ALSO be disallowed.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/ftc-negative-op...
"Customers may not know what they are signing up for or may only want to sign up for one service rather than the bundle"
But of course, they only feel the canceling part would be bad, not the signing up part (which is also ridden with dark patterns and deception to fool customers).
[0] https://www.axios.com/2024/08/21/disney-plus-court-case-arbi...
>"All wireless phones, even those that are not subscribed to or supported by a specific carrier, can call 911. However, calls to 911 on phones without active service do not deliver the caller’s location to the 911 call center, and the call center cannot call these phones back to find out the caller’s location or the nature of the emergency. If disconnected, the 911 center has no way to call back the caller."
Source: https://www.911.gov/calling-911/frequently-asked-questions/
Seems they're deliberately distorting their responsibilities.
Requiring carriers to enable whatever side-channel is necessary to transmit location info to the 911 PSAP shouldn't be a heavy lift.
The callback issue seems harder to resolve, but even if a handset has no assigned phone number, there are other ways to address it (e.g. IMEI). Carriers should be required to build in a capability to make this work.
These are spurious objections. They're grasping.
The Federal court system is divided into circuits [1]. Circuits are further divided into districts (eg Eastern District of Texas). In sparsely populated, large areas there districts may be further subdivided into divisions. The idea is you shouldn't need to drive 6 hours to get to a Federal judge.
Each district has an Appeals Court that sits above the District Court so that's what "Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals" means. Above all the circuit appeals courts sits the Supreme Court. Additionally, each circuit has a single Supreme Court judge who is available to hear emergency motions from appeals court rulings. That judge can rule on the motion or refer the matter to the entire Supreme Court.
Judges reflect the politics of the state they're in because of the blue slip system [2]. Presidents nominate judges to Federal courts. A Senator from that judge's state by tradition (ie there's no law for this) essentially can veto that nomination.
Federal district court judges have the power to make rulings and issue injunctions that affect the entire country.
So in Texas we have a perfect storm for judge shopping and a forum to push conservative views through lawsuits. Texas is a large state so the districts are divided into divisions. A division might only have 1-2 Federal district court judges. So if you nominally establish a business in Amarillo, TX you know with a high degree of certainty what judge you'll get when you file a lawsuit. With certain questionable tactics, you can know pretty much 100% what judge you "randomly" get assigned.
This is called "judge shopping".
It's why all the patent cases are litigated in the Eastern District of Texas. It's why any anti-abortion lawsuit always ends up in front of Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk [3] in the Northern District of Texas (eg [4]).
So the Fifth Circuit is conservative because Texas, Alabama and Louisiana are conservative. Conservative judges are usually viewed as more friendly to lawsuits attacking any sort of government regulation. Even if the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals doesn't rule in favor of the cable companies, the matter will go straight to the Supreme Court. This current Supreme Court has shown themselves highly likely to take up the case and intervene, probably in favor of cable companies.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_judicial...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_slip_(U.S._Senate)
[3]: https://www.txnd.uscourts.gov/judge/judge-matthew-kacsmaryk
[4]: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/07/1159220452/abortion-pill-drug...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/art...
Your ideology is leaking.
(There are different playbooks for passing laws that curtail personal rights, by arguing to do it at both the state and federal level, or removing federal prohibitions on something and then enacting it on a state by state basis while trying to pass the reverse at the federal level.)
Whenever people bring up "states rights" with objectively false claims, one needs to consider the history of such a claim. It was most prominent in the Secession Crisis and the obvious follow up question is "states rights to do what?" because the answer is "to own people as property".
Google is free.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_judiciary_of_the_Unite...
Yes, it was. The Founding Fathers created this system.
Simply use google instead of making up claims.
ExTwitter's new ToS require cases to be held in their jurisdiction, in Northern Texas, which has particularly wild people.
This is absurd court shopping/forum shopping & this court is slated to unmake a huge huge huge part of the USA. The Supreme Court has chastised them numberous times, but they are going to undo so so much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...