In your country if you get into a yearly contract to rent a place and then break the contract in 2 months. Are there any consequences for the person breaking the contract?

Absolutely. In Australia, the Critical Information Summary will detail the contract cancellation fee and the total minimnum cost (i.e. if you cancel it immediately after the cooling-off period) is explicitly stated right next to the cost that the company really wants to display.

So in the case of $1000/mo rent, and a 1 month cancellation fee, the minimum total cost will be displayed as $2000. If it is the total remainder of the contract, then it will be displayed as $12000.

It's not that there's no consequences, it's that the consumer is clearly and without the need to navigate dark patterns made visible of those consequences.

In the US, it is exactly the same. There are absolutely zero dark patterns on housing leases, it is highly controlled.

I am not sure if apartment lease is a good example.

As a counter example, here are some shady practices and dark patterns in Australia (Internet Service Provider): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haImi4cWau0

What I describe is specifically shown on mobile and internet plans.

Regarding your linked youtube video (which as far as I can tell from skimming, is basically ranting about how ISPs penny-pinch on backhaul capacity and then fail to meet their advertised plan speeds during peak hours), I would encourage you to look at something closer to the present than from 4 years ago. All ISPs now report on minimum speeds during defined peak hours. I believe this is mandated by the ACCC. See the following URL:

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/12/nbn-typical-evening-speed...

A typical ISP plan choice page [1] lists the following information:

1) Monthly price (e.g. "$79/mo")

2) Minimum total cost of the contract (e.g. "$158 if cancelled within the first month")

3) Typical evening speed (e.g. "48 Mbit between 7pm and 11pm" on a 50Mbit plan), which will change depending on which address you enter and thus which technology option you get (namely, if you are on FTTN you will see lower typical speeds reported than a FTTH address, especially for higher speed plans)

This was introduced specifically in response to this issue, where peak-hours congestion was a common complaint amongst consumers.

ISPs are also increasingly publishing their CVC graphs for each point of interconnect. This lets you see a historical utilisation of the network.

[1]: https://www.telstra.com.au/internet/nbn as an example

In the U.K. we actually have had these kinds of cases go to court and as a result those charges have to be presented clearly before the user has signed the contract. Some places even make you sign that specific clause to evidence that you’ve understood it. So there’s no chance of anyone engaging in a contract with termination charges without them understanding what those charges will be.

Of course, if there is no real reason to break the lease. E.g. if you're moving to a different city for work or starting to study.

Further, if something is advertised as XX Eur/mo it's implied it's a month-by-month thing. Situations you described are very very clearly marked as being a contract with a start and an end date as well as a total including any and all fees as well as cancelation terms. You can't hide essential terms deep within a several page legalese document.

The first word of the product name is "Annual". If someone proceeds to buy an "Annual" product with a lower price and doesn't bother to understand the meaning of why it's "Annual", I have no sympathy for that guy. I am on the same plan myself, it was very clear to me what they were trying to sell.

3 options, 1 yearly, 2nd yearly with monthly payment and third pure monthly. I did not have to read any long contracts to understand this.

If people don't do due diligence of 5 mins to find what is going on, it's on them..

This is what dark patterns rely on, why the hell would you be in support of companies taking advantage of people? Have you never had anything like this happen to you? Maybe you were tired or in a rush and a dark pattern ended up costing you money you didn't intend to spend? It's happened to me, and I'd dare day most people reading this.

I use this product and this plan. I knew what I was getting into when I bought it.

Scammy companies shouldn't be protected, but if people don't bother to do the most basic due diligence before buying products, it's on them - like forget reading a terms of service. He doesn't even read the product name or description. Gets into a yearly contract for a cheaper price and then complains about the cancellation fees.

At some point either people have to take personal responsibility or should have other adults buy things for them if they don't know what they are doing.

Why, though? What's the downside of allowing people not to be vigilant all the time? Presumably, all that businesses would lose out on is getting paid for not providing value to someone, which doesn't seem like it would stimulate a healthy market?

In this world there are people with less experience or understanding. There are people who have varying levels of cognitive or sensory ability. And there are people who are simply tricked by a company that does everything it legally can to fool them.

To suggest they either deserve to be tricked or shouldn’t be able to buy things themselves is revolting.

So you're in favour of people phone-scamming the elderly? They just need to take personal responsibility and do their due diligence, right? Or do you want to take away the ability to buy things of people you deem incompetent?

It is a basic necessity for beneficial trade to occur that the terms are made clear, not just technically available, to the people potentially wanting to undertake that trade, before anything legally binding occurs. The issue is not that there are cancellation fees, it's that they are not made clear.

The exaggerated, but still representative, example might be the Earth demolition plans in Hitchhiker's Guide, which were "available for 50 years in the local planning office in Alpha Centauri." Totally fair, right? Anyone could have just gone there and read them.

Demanding "personal responsibility" as a solution to avoid bad deals is the same as accepting that it's OK for some people to be scammed. No one is perfectly on guard all the time. If it is permissible for companies to engage in scammy behaviour, and scammy behaviour increases profits, then in order to be competitive, companies will engage in scammy behaviour. So it will be everywhere. Since, as noted, individual humans aren't perfect all the time, eventually someone will get scammed.

The obvious, morally superior, and more economically beneficial solution is simply to not allow scamming to be profitable. That, among other things, means ruling in favour of the consumer when companies perform shady practices.

Postscript: People with this kind of "libertarian" stance really annoy me. To give the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume that "personal responsibility" isn't just thinly veiled personal exceptionalist elitism. If that's the case, the only reason you can even have these beliefs is because you take so much about the modern world for granted. There is a lot going on in order to create an environment where mutually beneficial trade can happen.

In the absence of strict, neutral enforcement of fair trading rules, people scam the shit out of each other. It's way easier, and more profitable, than actually creating something of value that people want to buy. The total effect of this, if it were allowed to occur, is that it creates an environment of distrust and uncertainty, which means mutually beneficial trades that would otherwise happen won't happen, making everyone poorer. Advocating for "personal responsibility" as a solution to avoiding scummy business practices is directly advocating for this situation.

Historically, before commercial law was explicitly codified, the means of ensuring that merchants were trustworthy was essentially reputation. The way this scaled was with merchant groups, where the reputation of one member going bad affected them all, so they all had incentive to police each other (or alternatively, collude). Plus the fact that people in general were much less dependent on markets for necessary goods, the labour force being mainly agricultural. However, this made opportunity for trade highly exclusive, and largely only available to the privileged ("merchant class").

I guess my question for you is, do you want to have to read every single EULA, thoroughly scan the terms of every transaction every time you buy something, and otherwise do a lot of work and research any time you have to make some vaguely commercial agreement to avoid getting into an agreement you, in retrospect, didn't want? If not, I suggest you carefully re-examine your beliefs and what they imply.

A final remark. The economics of scamming are highly asymmetrical. If individuals have to do a lot of due diligence even for routine transactions, that is a massive cost to that individual. In contrast, organisations willing to partake in scummy behaviour can spend almost endless resources optimising their ability to ensnare customers, because once the process is developed, the marginal cost is very low if not zero. So individuals cannot be expected to "keep up" in this environment.