Comcast, Charter Sue FTC Over Efforts To Make Canceling Services Easier

Earlier this month the FTC announced it was modifying some existing rules to crack down on companies that make it extremely difficult to cancel services. The agency’s revamp of its 1973 “Negative Option Rule” requires companies be completely transparent about the limitations of deals and promotions, requires consumers actively consent to having read terms and deal restrictions, and generally makes cancelling a service as easy as signing up.

So of course, cable and media giants like Comcast and Charter, who’ve built an entire industry on being overtly hostile to consumers, are suing.

Under the banner of the NCTA (The Internet & Television Association), Comcast and Charter filed a lawsuit late last week in the Republican-heavy 5th circuit, claiming the new rules are “arbitrary,” “onerous,” “capricious,” and an abuse of the industry’s existing authority. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) (with members ranging from Disney to Google) also joined the lawsuit.

Corporate members of most of these organizations have a long, proud history of misleading promotions and making it difficult to cancel services. The Wall Street Journal, for example, historically made it annoyingly difficult to cancel digital subscriptions. And telecoms, of course, have historically made misleading their customers via fine print a high art form.

Kind of like hidden and misleading fees, we’ve cultivated a U.S. business environment where being a misleading asshole to the consumer is simply viewed as a sort of business creativity, not the fraud it actually is. That (plus corruption) has historically resulted in a feckless regulatory environment where this stuff is only fecklessly and inconsistently enforced. Usually with piddly fines and wrist slaps.

Telecoms have always been at the forefront of insisting that any effort to change this paradigm is regulatory over-reach. Thanks to recent Supreme Court rulings like Loper Bright (specifically designed to turn U.S. regulators into the policy equivalent of decorative gourds), they have more legal leverage than ever to crush corporate oversight with the help of a very broken and corrupt MAGA-heavy court system.

The flimsy logic pushed by the extraction class to justify the dismantling of Chevron deference was that feckless U.S. regulators (who again, in reality, can rarely take action against the worst offenders on a good day) had somehow gotten too bold, and that recent Supreme decisions had rebalanced things so that “out of control” regulators can’t act without the specific approval of Congress.

But corporations didn’t lobby the unelected Supreme Court because they were just honestly concerned about the balance of policy power among “unelected bureaucrats.” They did it because they know they’ve already lobbied Congress into absolute, corrupt dysfunction on nearly all meaningful reform and corporate oversight (guns, health, whatever). Now they’re taking aim at the already shaky authority of federal U.S. regulators. Once they’re done there, they’ll take aim at state consumer protection power.

Companies like Comcast envision a world in which there’s really no functional state or federal corporate oversight whatsoever. It really doesn’t matter the subject (net neutrality, transparency label requirements, privacy, efforts to stop racial discrimination in broadband deployment, annoying cancellations). They sue claiming regulatory overreach. And thanks to the corrupt Supreme Court and decades of demonization of the regulatory state as uniquely and purely harmful, corporations have a better chance of winning than ever.

And of course this isn’t just happening in telecom and media. It’s happening across every industry that touches every aspect of U.S. life, often in potentially deadly or hazardous ways (see this ProPublica report). Having federal regulators that can’t do anything without it being dismantled by the whims of an errant, logic-optional 5th Circuit Republican Judge will cause endless legal chaos and grind most meaningful reform to a halt, just the way industry designed it.

It’s the culmination of a fifty-year strategy by large corporations, it won’t be in any way subtle, and annoying cancellation obstacles will likely be the least of our worries as the chaos mounts in the years to come. Court reform (Supreme Court term limits and court expansion chief among them) is utterly essential, unless we really do want a world in which corporate power is the only power that matters.