Why do you think the FTC analysis was more accurate than the opposing sides? The judges, of whom there were multiple, were going off of opposing side argumentation not just their own subjective opinion. That's how courts in the US work.
The companies suing to stop this have every reason to massively inflate the difficulty and cost of compliance to continue their long established dark patterns of trapping people in difficult to cancel subscriptions. Judges are not experts in the field and have a hard time evaluating the actual credibility of various presented estimates, you see it all the time with long debunked forensic evidence techniques being accepted still years later by judges and courts.
To figure out who's right, we would need to do research, rather than choosing the judges versus the FTC based on vibes.
I'm hardly going to do that research myself, so I have no opinion. There are legal bloggers whose opinions I'd respect. I assume comments on Hacker News are no more informed than my own, unless they show they have relevant expertise.
Can you point to specific examples where the courts interpretation and reasoning wasn't rooted in the law and the arguments from the lawyers in the court specificall? Because I can't. I might disagree with some of the opinions but I can't point to anything where they were clearly not basing it on the law and the various lawyer's argumentation.
If you believe the judges are all being as objective as possible and that the systemic flaws in our judicial system are not being exploited by the Trump admin/lawyers representing the Trump admin without pushback from said judges than you can’t be convinced by me. I can cite an example, and if you aren’t personally convinced you can simply say “the court of law said x was innocent or y was held liable” or whatever you consider the correct arbiter.
You can appeal to the system that I am actively saying is not working but you get the benefit of “well the law/eatablishment says so.” You can lean on your opinion or the results, whichever serves you better, in a way I can’t as you cite the case itself. The entire discussion is poisoned out the gate.
No, that is not my position. I don’t know where you got that from. My position is advocating for healthy, much-deserved skepticism of the current judicial system. More specifically, I am saying that an appeal to some alleged neutrality/objectivity judges are supposed to maintain when carrying out their duty is particularly flimsy in 2025.
I don't know how you advocate for such a thing without holding judges to a standard of neutrality and objectivity and acknowledging/celebrating it when it happens.
I don’t understand what you’re saying anymore. It sounds like you’re agreeing with me? If we have to celebrate when it happens, then that means it’s not a standard expectation. It’s special and worthy of celebration.
Good catch. That whole pipeline is very robust too - I remember mocking the Burke society folks in college, not realizing at all that they were figuring out who was headed to work with federal judges/think tanks for the next generation.
