The EU’s new consumer rights law bans certain dark patterns related to e-commerce across Europe. The “sneak into basket” pattern is now illegal. Full stop, end of story. You cannot create a situation where additional items and services are added by default. [...]

Hidden costs are now illegal, whether that’s an undeclared subscription, extra shipping charges, or extra items. [....]

Forced continuity, when imposed on the user as a form of bait-and-switch, has been banned. Just the other day a web designer mentioned to me that he had only just discovered he had been charged for four years of annual membership dues in a “theme club”, having bought what he thought was a one-off theme. Since he lives in Europe, he may be able to claim all of this money back. All he needs to do is prove that the website did not inform him that the purchase included a membership with recurring payments.

Patent trolls have sued or threatened to sue tens of thousands of end-users. For example, Innovatio attacked cafes, bakeries, and even a funeral parlor for using off-the-shelf Wi-Fi routers. And the notorious scanner troll, MPHJ, targeted small businesses and nonprofits around the country for using ordinary office equipment. As a recent paper explained: “Mass suits against technology customers have become too common, involving building block technologies like wi-fi, scanning, email and website technologies.”

The growth in patent suits against customers reveals the importance of the Limelight case. A ruling that made it even easier to sue customers (by allowing suits against someone who performs just some steps of a patent) would encourage patent trolls to launch more abusive litigation campaigns. We hope the Supreme Court will restore the sensible rule that only a single entity (or its agents) can infringe a patent.

Interestingly, there is one special case where no-fee interconnection is embraced by the big ISPs -- when they are connecting among themselves. They argue this is because roughly the same amount of data comes and goes between their networks. But when we ask them if we too would qualify for no-fee interconnect if we changed our service to upload as much data as we download** -- thus filling their upstream networks and nearly doubling our total traffic -- there is an uncomfortable silence. That's because the ISP argument isn't sensible. Big ISPs aren't paying money to services like online backup that generate more upstream than downstream traffic. Data direction, in other words, has nothing to do with costs. ISPs around the world are investing in high-speed Internet and most already practice strong net neutrality. With strong net neutrality, new services requiring high-speed Internet can emerge and become popular, spurring even more demand for the lucrative high-speed packages ISPs offer. With strong net neutrality, everyone avoids the kind of brinkmanship over blackouts that plague the cable industry and harms consumers. As the Wall Street Journal chart shows, we're already getting to the brownout stage. Consumers deserve better.

Even if an algorithmic prisoner knows he is in a prison, he may not know who his jailer is. Is he unable to get a loan because of a corrupted file at Experian or Equifax? Or could it be TransUnion? His bank could even have its own algorithms to determine a consumer’s creditworthiness. Just think of the needle-in-a-haystack effort consumers must undertake if they are forced to investigate dozens of consumer-reporting companies, looking for the one that threw them behind algorithmic bars. Now imagine a future that contains hundreds of such companies. A prisoner might not have any idea as to what type of behavior got him sentenced to a jail term. Is he on an enhanced screening list at an airport because of a trip he made to an unstable country, a post on his Facebook page, or a phone call to a friend who has a suspected terrorist friend?

Most utilities don’t want smart metering.  In fact they seem to have used the wrong dictionary.  It is difficult to find anything smart about the UK deployment, until you realise that the utilities use smart in the sense of “it hurts”.  They consider they have a perfectly adequate business model which has no need for new technology.  In many Government meetings, their reluctant support seems to be a veneer for the hope that it will all end in disaster, letting them go back to the world they know, of inflated bills and demands for money with menaces. [...]

Even when smart meters are deployed, there is no evidence that any utility will use the resulting data to transform their business, rather than persecute the consumer.  At a recent US conference a senior executive for a US utility which had deployed smart meters, stated that their main benefit was “to give them more evidence to blame the customer”.  That’s a good description of the attitude displayed by our utilities.

Greyhound Recycling last month announced increases of 50 cents a month for customers on a flat monthly charge, 50 cents for each black bin collection for customers who pay by the lift and two cents a kilo for customers who pay by weight only. In a letter to customers, it described the levy as “tax imposed by the Government of Ireland on the people of Ireland”. However, following a complaint to the [National Consumer Agency] that the by-weight increase was 76 per cent more than the [government landfill levy] increase, Greyhound reduced the charge to an additional one cent a kilo.

Why isn't UMG's watermark talked about more? Maybe people think the audio quality problems are due to some kind of lossy compression, as I did, and ignore it completely, or blame the streaming service/distributor. The problem here is that the UMG watermark degrades the audio to about the equivalent of a 96 kbit MP3. My guess is that if consumers were informed about what is going on, they would care. Especially those who pay full retail price for digital downloads advertised as lossless audio.

The matter is something which should be of concern to every gig-going music fan, regardless of whether they go to Stradbally or not. For years, many have asked about TicketMaster's quasi-monopoly position in the marketplace and why this is so. We’ve always been told that promoters preferred to deal with one company rather than several and that TM’s systems and nationwide reach yadda yadda yadda was the bees’ knees etc. Other companies have tried to compete but no-one has been able to beat TM at this game.

But why would promoters go elsewhere when they’re getting a slice of the TM fees back as rebates? Those past off-the-record attempts by and briefings from promoters blaming TM for those fees can now be seen as hypocritical. They’re sticking with TM because they’re receiving a take of the fees paid by punters who have no other choice in service provider if they want to get their hands on tickets. You wonder what the acts make of this cash-grab – perhaps some whip-smart agent is already making a claim for a percentage of the rebates because there would be no rebates in the first place without the act.

Surely this is an issue for the Competition Authority and National Consumers Association too, given the manner in which the rebates are made and TM’s deals with the promoters? While promoters under TM deals are free to sell a certain proportion of their tickets with another provider, it’s usually only a very small percentage of the total and unlikely to trouble TM’s bottom line. Also, given that the rebates are volume-driven, it’s better for the promoters to keep the largest possible chunk of their business with TM. It seems that we have a new suspect in the blame game about why ticket prices are so high.