The correct policy here is not mandating a “button” or even “the same number of steps to unsubscribe as to subscribe”, rather the government should just mandate adherence to a simple protocol. Then we can just unsubscribe in our mail clients (gmail already tries to do this).
If you mandate a button, then each site will put it in a different place.
It’s frustrating to see the lack of technical competence cause us to land on sub-optimal decisions.
Another clear example was the cookie consent law; clearly this should have been an HTTP header or similar protocol so that user agents could proxy the user’s intent without breaking the browsing experience for every page.
This “government stupid, me smart” stuff is pretty tedious. You’re not even talking about the right concept – this is about unwanted recurring bills – but wanted to race to solving the simple part so quickly that you didn’t read the first paragraph.
The cookie consent law proposal similarly isn’t that simple. Nobody made their site worse because the EU forced them to, they did it because they’re trying to build opposition to privacy regulation. If you used a header not much would change because you’d have businesses arguing that the header could be set by accident or that the standard names didn’t represent their situation exactly. There’s a social problem here which can’t be solved with an IETF draft.
If you mandate a button, then each site will put it in a different place.
It’s frustrating to see the lack of technical competence cause us to land on sub-optimal decisions.
Another clear example was the cookie consent law; clearly this should have been an HTTP header or similar protocol so that user agents could proxy the user’s intent without breaking the browsing experience for every page.