Because without any form of regulation, the ISP has no requirement to honor that letter?
The whole point of "click to cancel" was to deal with the fact that a business, by contract law, can make it almost entirely impossible to stop owing them money through entirely legal means. The courts do not consider being on hold for 18 hours onerous enough to void a contract, so it's perfectly legal to require you to follow the "cancellation process", whatever that is.
Welcome to a world without consumer protections beyond basic contract law! American courts have long held the position that, if you agree to a contract, it really doesn't matter how onerous it is. Fuck you, caveat emptor and all that.
If you want to improve the situation without new regulation, we should push for courts to take a more reasonable stance: That contract law does not protect absurd contracts. This is supposed to be the current situation, but what it takes to get your contract declared null because it's unfair or onerous is just insane right now, because our courts have spent at least 50 years praying at the alter of "let businesses do literally anything they want under contract law"
>Because without any form of regulation, the ISP has no requirement to honor that letter?
Is this your personal exerience, or are you making assumptions?
I would love to hear how this process possibly fails to unsubscribe anyone:
1. Go to your state's corporate website and get/buy the name and address of the corporate registered agent for your ISP or whatever. In Texas that costs $1.
2. Write or ask ChatGPT to write a demand letter that they cancel your service as of the date of your letter. If they don't, threaten to sue them in small claims court. In Texas, threaten triple damages under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. (ChatGPT will help you write demands using the "laundry list" of deceptive acts.)
3. Send letter return receipt requested.
4. A lawyer on their side is now involved. They will neverever show up in any small claims court for this. And if they do, the judge is so on your side for this!
Heck, this works for a bunch of things, once you assert your rights. For example, I made a Coinbase account when they first existed and played with $10 of bitcoin. There it sat for six years or so, and then I tried to log in again. Their identity bullshit was demanding to use a phone number from an older phone and they stonewalled. So I sent a demand letter as above and, surprise!, my account was magically re-enabled for my $3 of bitcoin.
You'd spend far longer in the post office and the courts than you would on the phone.
All the company has to do in that court room is show that you mailed the form to someone whose job has nothing to do with account services, or who doesn't even have access or authorization to access people's private account information, or that they tried and failed to reach you in order to verify your identify since they sure as hell won't cancel the account of someone and shut off their service all because an anonymous letter showed up somewhere nobody was expecting to get it. What a great way to DoS an enemy or competitor if that worked. Just mail off some letters to a few store's webhosts right before Christmas or black friday.
The whole point of "click to cancel" was to deal with the fact that a business, by contract law, can make it almost entirely impossible to stop owing them money through entirely legal means. The courts do not consider being on hold for 18 hours onerous enough to void a contract, so it's perfectly legal to require you to follow the "cancellation process", whatever that is.
Welcome to a world without consumer protections beyond basic contract law! American courts have long held the position that, if you agree to a contract, it really doesn't matter how onerous it is. Fuck you, caveat emptor and all that.
If you want to improve the situation without new regulation, we should push for courts to take a more reasonable stance: That contract law does not protect absurd contracts. This is supposed to be the current situation, but what it takes to get your contract declared null because it's unfair or onerous is just insane right now, because our courts have spent at least 50 years praying at the alter of "let businesses do literally anything they want under contract law"