The reverse is always surprising to me: as if blocking a credit card constitutes the ending of a contract.
In Europe, a contract isn't entered or broken by making or blocking payment. Companies will very succesfully have their contracts enforced, with any extra costs billed to you. Apart from leaving the country, you're not going to get away with non-payment.
That's technically the case in most countries, just that enforcing those contracts has a cost.
Blocking the credit card is banking on the company not bothering to follow up, or (in case of company misbehavior), forcing them to show up in court and air their dirty laundry in front of the judge.
Maybe another difference is that some/many European countries people just don't not pay bills. I once heard it said about the Netherlands as being attractive to do business.
> Maybe another difference is that some/many European countries people just don't not pay bills.
That's the first time I ever heard of such thing, and I've lived in a few European countries. Some European countries even standardized service payments on direct debit, which worst case scenario leaves a bank holding the bag for the debt.
> forcing them to show up in court and air their dirty laundry in front of the judge
And showing up in court has costs, which are not guaranteed to be covered in any award/payment order, and even if you win there is still the matter of actually collecting. If it's all a matter of a few hundred dollars, most businesses will just write it off.
> Companies will very successfully have their contracts enforced
Hetzner turned off all access to my paid server due to a false-positive on their netscan/DDOS (literally it was tailscaled doing a netcheck) protection and equally incompetent technical support staff.
Can I sue them for breach of contract and subsequent damages? I moved all my hosting off Hetzner as a result, but I'm still very disappointed in their actions.
Ah, that's shitty. I guess in theory you could demand a refund or file a chargeback for an amount based on the services they didn't contractually provide. As you ceased doing business with them I don't think there would have been any drawback to this. IANAL
The reverse is always surprising to me: as if blocking a credit card constitutes the ending of a contract.
In Europe, a contract isn't entered or broken by making or blocking payment. Companies will very succesfully have their contracts enforced, with any extra costs billed to you. Apart from leaving the country, you're not going to get away with non-payment.