But then you're not really fixing it anymore. "Must be able to cancel directly via website" (i.e. without waiting for a customer service rep) might have been useful. Require only the same medium and soon Dish has both sign up and cancellation happen via a customer service chat window on their website, but if you choose sign up the chat has representatives/acceptance bots appear instantaneously to approve your sign up, whereas cancellation has a four hour queue and if you fail to wiggle your mouse every 30 seconds you get timed out.
You have to come up with a rule strict enough to defeat the corporate lawyers without making it so complicated or comprehensive that it puts significant compliance costs on smaller entities. Which is really hard to do, with the result that most of the rules that actually pass don't do that, which is why people get irked.
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.
Is there something in the proposed rule that actually says this? And if so, what happens to the small business that does cancellations over email/phone and therefore requires human interaction?
> And if the process takes time (there are times I think confirmations are warranted) once that's been done the cancellation takes place at the time of your original request. (Which you can screenshot.)
The issue isn't that you care if the cancellation happens at 9AM or 9PM, it's that if you have to wait twelve hours to speak to a representative you give up before reaching the point you can make the request.
Except that's not the proposed rule. The way this works in California (and the way the rule the FTC recently published works, I believe) is that a business is required to allow customers to cancel "in the same medium" that they subscribed. That doesn't require anyone to start running a website.
The rest of your post is just arguing against something that's not even happening.