FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent.

The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Event Invitations, 2023 series". I'm making those names up because I forget exactly what they were called, but you get the idea. I hope this was in violation of the regulation: surely you can't invent a new mailing list that didn't used to exist, add me to it, and require me to unsubscribe from it individually.

They finally stopped after I sent them an angry email.

I'm super appreciative of what we have, but there's absolutely issues.

CAN-SPAM specifies that the link must be clearly marked and suggests using CSS to do so, but the link is still always going to be at the bottom of the email in the smallest font used. It only matters for those of us who know to look for it; many people just have to live with the spam because they don't know it's easy to unsubscribe.

Sometimes it's not even going to be underlined or distinguished at all (that may be a violation actually but I'm not going to take them to court over it).

There's other dark patterns too, like certain unsubscribe pages requiring you to type/paste your email in to actually complete the process. That is 100% intentional friction, like github making you type the name of a repo into the deletion form. It should also be illegal for unsubscribing.

The big difference here is that this was created by an act of Congress, not the result of a regulatory body straining at the limits of its remit. That makes it much more likely to survive administration changes or court challenges.

Even now the CAN-SPAM act feels outdated -- I do like the unsubscribe button, but I would like to see email verification made explicitly required. That in order to start emailing you, you need to send an initial engagement email saying that the organization wants to start emailing you, and requiring you to actively opt-in to emails rather than just start sending them.

This would both cut down on marketing spam as well as mistaken email addresses. Most reputable websites do email verification where you have to enter a code or click on a link, but I have a surprising number of emails that get sent to me even though I am not the person the emails were aimed at.

>There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email...

The loophole is that companies now claim that the email is 'service' related as part of your 'account relationship' so you cannot unsubscribe at all, even though it clearly is for marketing and promotion.

I agree for the most part, but I've still had lots of problems with them. I've found unsubscribe links that go to domains that don't resolve, or to pages that 500 or 404. I've hit unsubscribe pages where tapping the unsubscribe button doesn't actually do anything. I run into one of these once every few weeks or so.

Despite the requirement for a link in the email, of course they're going to put it at the bottom, using a smaller font, often with a font color that's closer to the background color. This is garbage. Instead we should have a standard for an email header that specifies how to unsubscribe, so that email clients can present their own unsubscribe button in a conspicuous place, and then unsubscribe the recipient without any extra interaction required. And if these links fail to work too many times, the email provider can use this as a signal to stop accepting mail from that sender entirely. (And we do have this standard header! It's called List-Unsubscribe-Post.)

But this still doesn't really go far enough. I want a full ban on sending me unsolicited marketing emails. Signing up for an account somewhere should not mean they're allowed to send me marketing emails, and any checkboxes authorizing that along the way should be initially unchecked. And they shouldn't be able to dark-pattern me into checking them by making it look like a required consent type checkbox.

Absent that, any entity that wants to market to me should have to send me an initial email confirming that I indeed want to receive their marketing emails. If I do not reply, that's considered lack of consent, and then they should not be able to try again, at all, forever.

Not being blacklisted as spam is a huge market based incentive to add unsub links.

A major reason for the mass adoption is that most companies use email services because running your own marketing email servers are extremely difficult. And those companies don't allow you to send emails without one to protect their own email servers in addition to following the various laws in different countries. It's easier to get compliance via these larger companies, particularly when it naturally aligns with market incentives.

Regulating a million niche SaaS sites each with an individual custom payments page may be quite a bit harder. But maybe stuff like Stripe will make it easier as a proxy for this regulation.

> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are.

The sheer number of comments that think the state of "unsubscribe" is good is... saddening. I should not have to click a link to "unsubscribe" from something that I did not subscribe to. There's no recourse for me against these thieves.

The best part about requiring them to use the word “unsubscribe” is I can do this email rule: If an email says “unsubscribe” in it, move it to “says-unsubscribe” folder.

I look at that email once a week for the false positives. Huge QoL increase.

There is malicous compliance. They can create new email categories, to which you are auto "resubscribed" - you validating that the email is used and has a reader that reads the emails and cleans his mailbox is worth a buck.

Then you hovering over topics you might be interested before unsubscribng gives away preferences.

I think a huge part of this is that email providers use the functional existence of that link to screen spam.

I've always wondered how Vanguard gets away with this. They send a lot of promotional emails that all say this near the bottom of the message:

> Because you're a valued Vanguard client, we thought you'd be interested in this information. If you prefer not to receive emails of this type, simply email us. Please do not reply to this message to opt out.

> The material in this message is promotional in nature.

No unsubscribe link.

Got to love the CAN-SPAM act. It seems rare such acts would pass these days without making substantial compromises for advertisers. Which if it were up to them, we would still be looking for a tiny unsubscribe link at the very bottom in a font color that matches the background.

And can I point out how unreasonably difficult it is to prevent physical/paper spam? It blows my mind that our email laws are more restrictive than physical mail.

> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are.

> There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one.

My spam folder constantly receiving new messages from political campaigns under new lists and org names begs to disagree. One donation in 2008 and I'm simply trapped in the system with no recourse.

Seems like the rules selectively don't apply to certain classes.

There is additional incentive here. Companies that make it hard to unsubscribe risk being reported as spam which impacts their deliverability. It's in company's best interest to allow a straight forward opt out or risk getting blocked.

> When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible

I suspect that people who say this have no experience of European-like systems which work on the basis of regulating things to prevent them from becoming an issue.

A huge part of this is to make sure the regulators have clear guidance and the teeth to enforce regulation. Take, for example, the UK's Health and Hygiene regulator. They have the power to inspect premises and processes and force proprietors to make their ratings visible. In extreme cases, they can shut down an establishment for non-compliance.

Is it 100% perfect? Obviously not, people still get food poisoning or swallow glass in their food. That said, it's not common, and you can easily avoid 1* establishments. If someone isn't displaying their star rating, it's obvious why and you can easily avoid them, too.

A smart person could think of dozens of ways around any explicit legalistic regulation intended to protect consumers, given an afternoon.

Ultimately every regulation needs an uncaptured civil service regulator who can take offense at somebody trying to perform cheeky workarounds and impose disproportionate punitive measures & regulatory adjustments when the spirit of the law is violated. If you don't have that (and we don't, in many areas), then you don't have effective government.

This is why the Federalist Society going after Chevron deference is part of an attempt to overthrow the government; If the iterative regulatory loop demands a full appellate process followed by getting half the votes in the House, 60+ votes in the Senate, and one vote in the White House, then no regulation will be performed in practice. Virtually everything the FTC does is now subject to Federalist Society veto given sufficient time for the lawsuits to be filed & processed.

In the case of unsubscribe links I think it’s more about having your sending reputation destroyed by ISPs because they will penalize you heavily if people have to use the spam button to unsubscribe. Our company makes it as easy as possible and practically encourage people to unsubscribe because of this.

Well, the workaround to unsubscribe is just spam. It’s hard to argue that I get effectively fewer emails as a result of those regulations, even though I like them. I just get effectively infinite emails. There’s no effective difference between 10,000 spam emails a day and 11,000. The fact that Banana Republic actually stops sending me email when I tell them to is nice (for me and them really) but not practically meaningful.

To the extent that I see anything other than spam email it’s just because of spam filters not anything regulatory. If you don’t believe me just run an email server with no spam filter.

This regulation might actually be better though because it applies to only services users have given a credit card to. Those services are thus 100% dependent on access to the federal banking system, which can easily be revoked.

The Unsubscribe links are so good now because all of those newsletters use the same handful of email marketing services. It's pretty much impossible to run your own email marketing campaign without them, you'll get sent right to everyone's Gmail spam box. Because those services are so big, they'll follow the CAN-SPAM act. What legitimate marketer wants to pay money for a service that's going to send your emails to spam boxes and potentially get you in trouble with the FTC? Despite Google making it difficult to run your own email server and doing a bunch of other fucked up shit, the centralization of email has produced a few good outcomes.

Now if we could only have the same level of control over the junk mail in our physical mail boxes.

Unfortunately, it's not foolproof.

During the ~20 years that my predecessor in my current job worked in it, it gradually evolved from being primarily a hardware position with a little software development to primarily a software position with a little hardware building. My moderate expertise with electronic hardware helped get me the job, but then I basically never had to use it in the ~15 years I've been here.

I still get multiple emails from Electronic Design daily. No amount of attempting to unsubscribe stops them. I've blocked multiple sending email addresses; they rotate them fairly frequently.

It's possible I could report them for this (I haven't researched it), but since I think my spam filter has missed maybe 1-2 emails in all that time, it tends not to be worth it.

Until the link tries to redirect through their click tracking service, and is blocked by my firewall. Really dislike that

Imo it should be a single header that points to a url that accepts a post payload. Email clients could then surface the link

I don’t think regulation has much to do with their excellence at all - it’s largely ESPs competing to provide a better mailbox experience and using things like that and spf/dkim/dmarc conformance to reduce spam.

Another trick I've noticed is to use the unsubscribe link as a redirect to a (surprise?) non-functioning webpage. "Sorry, please contact the account administrator to unsubscribe."

The laws are not unreasonably great. There is no actual blocker to them spamming you again. There’s many ways to maliciously comply like opting you out of a tiny category of their email and making that less obvious so they can keep emailing you unwanted spam. And the law doesn’t let you take them to court for abusing you. That’s why platforms like Bandwidth.com and Sinch have so many spammers as customers - it’s just revenue for them.

This is not the case though, I click unsubcribe from the IEEE trashcan spam email and they ask me to login to their website to unsubscribe, wtf.

I've started receiving emails that say 'reply "unsubscribe" to stop receiving emails' rather than have an unsubscribe link. This just started happening a few months ago, so I think this is a workaround that someone figured out.

I've started blocking all of them and sending straight to spam.

Gmail "Report Spam" is my unsubscribe link. It's even got its own hotkey "!".

It’s amazing what penalties can do

Can spam provides for up to $50k PER EMAIL in civil penalties.

If you make 1 cent or $10 per email, doesn’t matter. It’s no where close to that level of penalty. So you make damn sure you don’t ruin yourself.

Now we just need that kind on text messaging - it’s a Wild West these days

The problem is email regulations prevent you, the individual, from taking them to court for spamming you. As I recall only the government (like DOJ) can file a case for spam. Basically the US law was actually a bad compromise for everyday users

FTC rule is doomed to failure.

I'm working with a state lawmaker in my state to try to get a law to this effect passed, but I'm asking him to write into the law an individual cause of action. In other words, I don't want people to have to wait for the state attorney general to take notice and decide to act (or the FTC in the case of this article). I want the affected user to be able to go to small claims court and sue for $500 or $1000 or whatever. I believe this will be much more effective as it forces the abuser to have to defend themself in court all over the place (at significant cost) or lose all over the place (at significant cost) or stop abusing.

This really points to California being the capital of the United States. Everything happens here first and the rest of the nation then follows. Amazing.

Uh, email unsubscribe links started out great but are now really bad unfortunately :'-( The mailers do all sorts of tricks to make it really difficult to ubsubscribe. Eg, you think you subscribed to one newsletter but they actually subscribe you to many different actual subscriptions with your email address, and give them slightly different names, like 'XYZ News', 'XYZ Updates', 'Stay in touch with XYZ'. Then you are forced to unsubscribe from each of these one by one, and you don't even know if you got them all; there could be more that they could spring on you later.

There are now email unsubscribe services, but they don't really work either: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-email-unsubs...

there's a particular car rental company that I can't get off their list because it error 500's when I click the unsubscribe button

Why do unsubscribe-regulations work so well? What is the punishment for not complying and is enforcement particularly swift?

I think blocking traffic from a domain into your inbox would be a better way to handle this without regulation.

In my experience "unsubscribe" emails often do not work at all. SimpleLogin is the only way.

I prefer to click spam, because as I understand it, it hurts their reach in the future.

Except Walgreens. They say unsubscribe and then they just don't do it.

Why don't you blame YC for this? They fund and repeatedly promote this AI email slop. There is a startup called AI SDR that send random emails who have no context.

Same with Resend. Start at home before blaming others or screaming at the sky.

> When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are.

The general problem is that the government is miserable at drafting things. Even take the regulation you like:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...

> "Your message must include your valid physical postal address."

WTF? They can't just pass a simple rule that says you need a working unsubscribe link, they have to include some arduous nonsense that requires small businesses to pay for a PO box so they don't have to publish their home address in every email.

Nobody wants to unsubscribe by postal mail. But decades later the requirement is still there. So then businesses oppose every new rule because the government can't refrain from making them pointlessly onerous.

Doesnt seem to apply to Experian

> I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are.

While I generally agree with your opinion, the case is that bad actors are using the unsubscribe link to identify real email addresses. The vast majority of people do not match what I imagine might be the average HN tech-savvy audience.

They get an email they don't want and click on "Unsubscribe" to get rid of it. What they don't know is that they have been added to a database of "live" emails to be sold and reused for all sorts of purposes from that point forward.

In other words, as is the case for many laws, they keep honest people honest. You do not control criminals with laws until the result of the law is that they end-up in prison (or whatever the appropriate punishment might be).

I ran an experiment during the last presidential election (US). I used two separate throw-away emails to subscribe to updates from both the Republican and Democratic parties. I used these emails directly on the main organization pages. I also setup filters to sort all incoming emails into two separate folders.

A year later I deleted both email accounts and the tens of thousands of messages on both folders. It was an interesting game of whack-a-mole. Clicking on "unsubscribe" had no real effect. Both parties passed this email to, it seemed, everyone except for the local school janitor. It was nothing less than insane. There was no effective way to make it stop. I unsubscribed from both main organizations. That did nothing at all.

My conclusion was that, while "Unsubscribe" sounds good and looks useful, it only works with non-criminal organizations (sorry, I consider political parties to be at the threshold of being criminal organizations). It's like a lock on a door, or, to use a more provocative example, a gun. The laws surrounding these things only get respect from honest law-abiding people. A criminal will gladly take a crowbar to your door-lock and break into your home, or use a gun to do the same or worse.

Going back to unsolicited emails (and by extension SMS), not sure how we fix this in real terms. It's a really difficult problem.

UCSD has me on a bunch of lists as a former parent of an undergraduate. No way to unsubscribe. Infuriating.

this is not my experience. for me, clicking the unsubscribe link is basically confirmation to them that the email address they sent their spam too is a legit email address.

Further, often I get the "okay, we'll remove you within 30 days" bs

... Except it clearly works and I've unsubscribed from 99% of emails without ever going to their site?

Man, I remember when Amazon Prime first started, I signed up for the free trial to get free shipping on something. Of course, I forgot about it and didn’t cancel, but then I got an email from Amazon saying, “hey, you didn’t cancel your prime subscription but you also haven’t used it at all, so we are going to not charge you and cancel it for now. Here is how you easily restart your subscription if you end up needing it”

It was such a wonderful feeling that clearly impacted me so much I remember it some 20 years later. I gained SO MUCH loyalty to Amazon after that, and sure enough, I restarted my prime subscription a bit later when I got a better job and started ordering more stuff. They made so much more money off me because they sacrificed those few dollars for one month of my subscription fee to show me they weren’t just trying to make me forget to cancel.

Amazon today would never do that, of course, but man I think more companies should if they want long term, loyal, customers.

While the Adobe thing is the common punching bag, I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that people probably need to either be more honest, or need to pay more attention.

When you subscribe there are three prices given-

Monthly, Annual paid monthly, and Annual prepaid. The Annual paid monthly very clearly indicates that there is a fee if you cancel after 14 days. The annual paid monthly is some 33% less expensive than monthly, with the downside that you're committing for a year, or to pay a termination fee if you cancel early.

https://imgur.com/a/ldhiEtf

This has been extremely clear for years. Like you have to be blind to not see a "Monthly" that costs much more at the top, then one called "Annual billed monthly" and not have paused to do some diligence.

Adobe does a lot of shady stuff, but on this topic we seem to hear the most from careless, thoughtless, or selfish people who think they figured out how to game the system. Kind of like the "my laptop got stolen out of my car and it had the only copy of all of my important documents and the doctoral thesis I've been working on for seven years" stories, at some point we have to not be so naive with people's foolishness.

> One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services should automatically pause if you stop using it.

Cool idea, but probably tough to enforce what “using it” means. I could see companies start sending newsletters to customers and calling that engagement

> I think they promoted a yearly subscription that was meant to look like a monthly subscription, where if you cancelled early they would charge you an exorbitant cancellation fee. I'm not sure how these new rules affect them.

I don't think it's the same situation. What Adobe was doing was offering a yearly subscription, charged monthly. If you tried to cancel, it would ask for payment to either cover the rest of the sub or to cover the "savings" that the user had obtained by selecting an annual sub rather than a true monthly (can't remember what exactly it tried to charge). It was deceptive as hell, but it's probably not covered by this rule.

> One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services should automatically pause if you stop using it.

That seems a bit fuzzy to implement, depending on what the service actually does. It's not always clear-cut, like watching a show on a streaming service; for example, what if the service does things in the background for the user too even if they're not actively 'using' it.

My compromise would be something like: if the user hasn't actively engaged with your service for X month(s), email/text them a reminder asking if they still want to be subscribed.

> where if you cancelled early they would charge you an exorbitant cancellation fee.

I'm currently in the process of de-Adboe'ing my life because of the subscription model.

It's not htat you get charged an exorbitant cancellation fee, per se. It's that, from Adobe's point of view, you entered into a year-long contract. And so if you want to cancel after 3 months, the only option they give you is to pay for the rest of the entire year upfront.

This has a lot of artists really pissed off and many are saying they're finally done with Adobe.

Fortunately, I think we're finally in an era where Adobe doesn't actually offer the best products anyway.

For Photoshop I'm playing with Affinity Photo. It has a six month free trial and after playing with it for a couple of months I think I'm going to pay for it when the trial is up. And it's a flat fee / perpetual license.

I've been playing around with Inkscape as a FOSS alternative to Illustrator and it's OK. I might give the Affinity Designer trial a go since I'm enjoying Affinity Photo.

For video editing Davinci Resolve is so far ahead of Premiere that it makes me wonder why Premiere is still used by anyone regardless of other considerations. What's bonkers is that BlackMagic gives the standard version of Resolve away for free... and I have yet to find myself needing features that are in the paid Studio version.

It has its own FX tool called Fusion built-in, so After Effects also gets replaced by Resolve.

I never used Adobe Animate but am starting to get into 2D animation and really like Moho Pro. It's not free but it has a perpetual license and apparently the first version of this software was created for BeOS 30 years ago, and then got ported to Windows and Mac as AnimeStudio... so it's been around forever, has a cool history and is starting to get used by a lot of pro studios since it gives you 3D style rigging for 2D / "cutout" animation which was its killer feature for me.

Anyway Adobe is one of the largest companies in the world but I suspect big changes are coming in a few years because I can't think of any reason to buy into Creative Cloud in current year ... like not a single reason. Maybe if you've got some PSD files laying around that can't be opened in alternatives like Affinity Photo because they take advantage of very specialized features or something then you might be screwed but I haven't ran into any issues opening my old PSD files in Affinity.

Let me regale you with the story of my Adobe Subscription cancellation.

I had been considering learning Illustrator and to align myself, I decided to get a little skin the game. I signed up for the "monthly" subscription. I downloaded Illustrator, and this screenshot was my entire experience:

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...

Suffice it to say, this didn't meet my expectations. I thus decided to cancel and was presented with a $108 cancellation fee.

Boo.

I hit up customer service and explained my frustration. I was told that I was going to pay that $108 since I agreed to it. I countered that contracts required consideration and since Adobe had provided no consideration for my valuable cash, no contract had been perfected betwixt us. He was unwilling to see my point. I asked for his contact information for follow-up, which he provided. I then explained to him that after I hung up, I was not only NOT going to pay, but that within 60 days Adobe would cancel the subscription voluntarily on their side and not collect a single further dime from me.

His response basically amounted to "good luck with that."

So, I got a temporary prepaid credit card number with $5 on it and swapped out the CC on file with Adobe.

I then went over to Amazon and spent that $5. Who knows on what.

A month goes by, turns out $0 is insufficient for a monthly subscription payment. I get a notice that the balance isn't good. I get several more notices.

Then I get a notice that if I don't pay, I'll lose access. At about 60 days, they cancelled the subscription. I took a screen shot and emailed it to the CSR's contact with my "I told you so" scrawled on it.

I never heard back, but in my mind it was a great victory. Tickertape and swooning ladies.

If you ever deal with elderly parents you’ll learn the full extent of this. It’s shocking how many worthless subscriptions my in-laws had.

Services I’m not sure even exist any longer. An AOL account!

> One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services should automatically pause if you stop using it

Amazon got me on this multiple times for prime, now I always pay for delivery directly, because in the long run it's cheaper.

The most recent incarnation of their cancel subscription page had such intentionally shitty UX that I thought I had cancelled, but there were more pages to click through. So I ended up paying 2 months for zero usage. I'm fed up with the never ending changing landscape of tricks. Fuck subscriptions.

At least they didn't make you make a phone call and have a rep try to prevent you from doing so for an hour (looking at you NYT).

Services like this are the reason I prefer to pay thru google play. It is much easier to just cancel it

Yeah Spotify removed one of my family members from my 5-person subscription (only using 3 slots) so I immediately cancelled my subscription and had to deal with a lot of manipulative tactics to not cancel. This kind of behaviour 1, shouldn't be legal and 2, shouldn't be rewarded. I have plenty of Spotify alternatives, so this kind of behavior ultimately signals a floundering company resorting to hacks.

It wasn’t clear to me that this sort of thing is explicitly forbidden under this regulation?

Amazon is the worst in this regard.

> I believe they also offer a "stop allowing charges by this merchant" feature

If they have this it's another reason to use them for automatic billing. I have tried to do this with a VISA card and they said they cannot do it; the only way to prevent future charges would be to close that account entirely and even then I might still get billed for some period of time.

Although in practice I don't think it will be an issue, in theory issuing a chargeback on your credit card does not release you from any financial obligations you agreed to with a contract. And if that contract specifies that you must "call to cancel" I don't think "I emailed" will hold up in court (but IANAL). Of course with this FCC ruling that could very well not be the case, but in any case always be wary of issuing a chargeback and thinking the matter settled if you did actually have legitimate commerce with the business in question.

This is good to know. I had Dropbox billing through PayPal and could never cancel charges in anyway through the Dropbox site. Realized I had to disassociate PayPal and the recurring charge said “payment failed”. Finally effectively canceled.

AmEx is great for this. I've used it twice, no issues that I can tell. I had my personal card attached to a BrowserStack account that used a work email address. Forgot to cancel it when I left the job and BrowserStack support was completely useless. One chat session with AmEx later and I receive no more charges from BrowserStack.

Of course I have to remember that they are blocked on that card, should I ever need an account again in the future.

> I believe they also offer a "stop allowing charges by this merchant" feature that cuts off future charges.

Yes, but you have to call or chat them. It's quick, but I'd _much_ prefer a way in app / website to block a merchant.

The best part is the chargeback costs the vendor something like $15

The best workaround (imho) is just using virtual cards. My Venture X allows me to create a virtual card on the spot restricted to that merchant where I can also enter an optional lock date. If I want to try something, I just create a new card and set the lock date to the next day. Even if I forget to cancel, good luck charging my card :)

Click to Cancel: The FTC’s amended Negative Option Rule and what it means for your business

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/10/click-can...

The rule wasn't adopted with unanimity and one of the FTC Commissioners (Melissa Holyoak) issued a dissenting statement that basically - with Chevron - will serve as a blueprint for contesting its adoption. [0] If the past is a guide to the future, it can be expected that the 5th Circuit will be the first out of the gate with a ruling.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/holyoak-dissent...

The FTC has rule making authority but it will certainly be litigated.

My expectation is a case will quickly be brought in the Northern District of Texas, they'll rule it unlawful (following Commissioner Holyoak's lead), then it'll get bumped up to the 5th Circuit on appeal and they'll issue a stay.

I don't expect to see this rule take affect anytime soon, if ever.

Chevron deference is about statutory interpretation so it really depends on the statue they are doing it under and any ambiguities that arise around the ability to do this. It may be clearly covered or it may not be, we would have to look. And if there are ambiguities it may go the way of the FTC, but since Chevron is gone, not automatically.

The FTC has the power to make rules about "unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce." All the lack of Chevron deference means is the courts are more willing to step in to decide whether or not a rule falls under that. So in this case it makes it harder for FTC to fight a hypothetical NYT lawsuit, but far from impossible.

In practice abolishing Chevron deference mostly means rules will follow the politics of judges rather than the current administration. TBH I think this rule is far enough from the culture war that it will probably stand anyway. Unless the NYT happens to buy the judges a lot of vacations...

NYTimes already allows cancelling online for most subscriptions, so I imagine this won't be a big issue for them.

There isn't a generic answer for this. You'd have to check the specific laws setting up what the FTC can do, which is more research than you can reasonably expect from an HN post, unless we get super lucky with some very, very specialized lawyer posting.

We gotta stop giving SCOTUS credit for bad decisions when they make unpopular opinions. SCOTUS is not supposed to make legislation, and if they are going to try and override Chevron from the bench without legislation, then we have to ignore them.

SCOTUS' power/respect only goes as far as they're actually listening to the will of Americans. This is not representing Americans if they override. Same for abortion (just legality not anything about enforcement), same for presidential immunity.

We have expectations, and they do not align with SCOTUS, so SCOTUS is not a valid interpretive institution. "The Supreme Court has made their decision, let's see them enforce it."

How exactly do you think the lack of the Chevron deference impacts the FTC here?

It's like asking whether Congress has the power to enact laws now that judicial review is a thing

They have all the power they need to enact this.

[flagged]

This. It's crazy we don't have a public/ private key system for our credit cards. One of the reasons i prefer to pay with crypto when i can. When i give you my credit card information you are pulling from my account instead of me pushing into your account. The difference is subtle but a very big one from a security perspective.

I have paid for everything via credit card for 20+ years now, entering my credit card info online thousands of times, and have yet to have a fraudulent charge.

And if I do, I just call the number on the back of the card and they give the money back to me.

The system works 99% of the time, for billions and billions of transactions. Which is why it has stayed.

Edit: obviously, ideally, there would be a federal government constitutionally protected electronic payment system where people can push payments to one another.

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/10/click-can...

> If people originally signed up for your program in person, you can offer them the opportunity to cancel in person if they want to, but you can’t require it. Instead, you need to offer a way for people to cancel online or on the phone.

You're overthinking it. If there's any confusion, it will go to court, and reasonable humans will decide that, actually, the form being in a filing cabinet in the basement isn't actually reasonable.

> could they argue that they require someone to physically come out to turn off service?

In the case of in-person consent the rule requires that they also offer an online or telephone cancellation option.

> Could they make the signup and cancel process worse at the same time [...]

"must be at least as easy to use as the mechanism the consumer used to consent to the Negative Option Feature.". I read that it must hold true for every specific consumer based on how hard it was for them to consent.

The rules also sets general restrictions to the online and phone options in addition to the "at least as easy" restriction. For Online the cancellation option must be "easy to find" and explicitly bars forced interaction with representatives or chatbots during cancellation unless they were part of the sign-up process. For Telephone the cancellation must be prompt, the number must be answered or accept voice messages, must be available during normal business hours, and must not be more costly than a call used to sign up.

They didn't require someone to come out to get you signed up for service.

Litigation could resolve malicious attempts to "complicate" signups for the purposes of complicating cancellation.

>I am very curious what exactly this means? Is it the number of pages or forms you had to fill out? People you had to talk too?

Captcha games are going to become an olympic sport.

> I really wish they just required what Apple requires on the App Store. It requires 2 clicks, clicking cancel and then confirm. No upselling since it all happens within Apple's Settings.

It's complicated.

If all anti-piracy measures were enforced successfully, such as they are on Apple platforms; if there were insurmountable paywalls everywhere; but, subscriptions were cheaper, would you be better off? What about the average person? What is the right policy?

As absurd as it sounds: I probably would have a NYT subscription right now if it were easier to cancel.

I sometimes subscribe to these organizations for a few months, then cancel to try something new, come back for a bit etc.

But NYT has forever lost me with their cancellation nightmare.

I cancelled my membership at 24 Hours Fitness back in the early 2000s. They informed me that because of how their system works it can take a few weeks to process the cancelation and I will get charged for another month. This is such BS and obviously a scam. When the charge appeared on my credit card, I just disputed it with evidence of cancelation and that was that.

Conversely there is a gym in my town that was a month to month subscription with moments notice cancellation. They'd even pro-rate your remaining time back to you. I ended up joining and cancelling those gyms a lot through college years, but I'm much more willing to rejoin if it was easy to cancel.

If you setup a "payment agreement" between yourself, the gym (or any similar service), and your credit card, you should be able to cancel that agreement and the subsequent services that agreement entailed through your credit card. The byzantine and manipulative things that gyms do are, in part, because we basically let them control the cancellation process.

If you can sign up for the gym online, then you need to be able to cancel online. That's how this rule is meant to work for all kinds of merchants. Gyms would still be free to pull their usual car-salesman shenanigans on cancellation if they're willing to only take new subscriptions on location and not online, too.

I was wondering this too.

LA Fitness wanted me to mail something to their headquarters, which was intentionally onerous. I filed a complaint with BBB and cc'd LA Fitness on them, and they ended up cancelling it for me.

Still, I did originally sign up for the gym in person, so I wonder if they'd be allowed to force the person to come back in person to cancel. This still seems like too much work, especially for when people move.

That's why the only gyms I've signed up for have been YMCAs, because I know I can cancel my membership there without hassle.

I recommend asking your neighborhood/city subreddit for gyms that aren't awful when cancelling

I just had the pleasure of a one email cancellation with my gym after moving

Gyms are so damn scummy with this. When I cancelled my last gym membership due to moving I had to show them that there would be no nearby gyms of that brand where I was moving in order to let me cancel.

[flagged]

Californians: has it worked out well? As a non-Californian it does seem to have, given how often the cancellation terms are specifically more favorable to Californians, but I wonder how it works in practice.

makes me wonder if I can unlock this feature by making the cancellation request from a California IP...

Agreed. The fact that multiple companies are springing up with the main selling point being "help you cancel subscriptions you thought you already cancelled" should be a wake up call to the legislature that this problem has gotten out of hand.

Now, let's institute an actual price rule. I can't rent an Airbnb or book a plane ticket without being lied to about what the actual prices is.

This feels like one of those things that could be solved on the payment end with something like a unique payment ID for each subscription, rather than giving a CC number. Then you just enable or disable payment IDs (perhaps for a limited time, e.g., "create a payment ID that works for Netflix for the next three months but not after that"), rather than relying on vendors to decide whether they feel like charging you or not.

> The fact that something is happening, even slowly

Regulation like this, as necessary and obvious as this one is, should happen slowly. There are way too many short sighted, reactionary laws and regulations to begin with.

If you like this kind of thing please vote for Democrats this November.

Edit: Instead of downvoting how about you point me to the Republican platform that endorses consumer protections ?

I much prefer this type of government intervention than picking winners (Apple) and losers (Google) with regard to app stores.

Came to say this too, basically. The FTC is currently a bright candle in the swamp.

I think we need a word for this work. Maybe disenshittification? :)

For every "you" avoiding subscriptions, there's an idiot like me who has had several $5-10/mo. subscriptions for years because I keep hitting the "call customer service to cancel" wall and procrastinating.

It absolutely does. I got bit by the NYT back when they had call-to-cancel, and I won't subscribe to any company that doesn't have an unsubscribe button. I just search "bla company unsubscribe," and if it's call to cancel, I won't subscribe.

The worst part is it poisons the whole business model for me. Even if your company could restrain itself from these tactics I won't know that until it is to late and even if I did research it there isn't any reason it couldn't change to be awful from being OK. The end result is I turn my nose at the very idea because subscription services are fine with me as an idea but in practice I just don't want to waste the energy dealing with them.

If it does, then "record profits" sure is a bizarre way to punish them.

Just a note:

It is up to the company to not pursue you for the money. Contractually, you probably still owe them the money, unless there is a clause in the contract that says that non-payment is a way to cancel the membership. They could legally pursue that, or sell it to someone else to pursue.

Not paying is not the same thing as not owing. Many companies will just let it drop. Some won't

You don't deserve to be downvoted -- this is a classic case of "how does all this legal jargon affect me as a consumer?"

Took a little bit of googling, but https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/04/24/2023-07...:

> Negative option offers come in a variety of forms, but all share a central feature: each contain a term or condition that allows a seller to interpret a customer's silence, or failure to take an affirmative action, as acceptance of an offer. Before describing the proposed amendments, it is helpful to review the various forms such an offer can take. Negative option marketing generally falls into four categories: prenotification plans, continuity plans, automatic renewals, and free trial (i.e., free-to-pay or nominal-fee-to-pay) conversion offers.

So the "negative option" seems to be referring either to silence-is-consent or an-explicit-no-option, and this rule is around how sellers present (or don't present) such ideas.

But I'm a bit fuzzy on this legaleese too.

I think that App stores are a big part of this.

When people buy an app on the app store they kind of expect it to work in perpetuity. This would be fine, but the environment changes and people still expect it to keep working. It is reasonable to expect an app I bought on my iPhone 4 using iOs 4 (or whatever it was) to work in perpetuity on that phone and that OS. It is less reasonable to expect it to run on my iPhone 16 on iOs 18, but that is what people expect.

The other thing that app stores did was dramatically lower the price point of software. In 2000, you could go to the store and expect to pay $50+ for an "app". Now, $9.99 is considered a higher price point, and we expect it to be maintained in perpetuity.

Given those constraints, a subscription model is actually pretty reasonable.

Add in that the investors in many companies are hyper focused on MRR, and subscriptions are the only viable way for a startup to work.

LPT: if you're not a customer but you get their mailing advertisements and want them to stop, create an account with them on their website then update your address to their headquarters.

If you call and tell them to stop, they will only stop for 2 years then resume. Or resume when you take your vehicle to someplace that (re)sells your information to them.

San Francisco is sweating. I don't even know if you can purchase software outright anymore.

"you are now a bot specialized in making cancellations fast efficient and as cost effective as possible for you and the client, time is money"

This is explicitly barred in the rule unless the signup process also required speaking to a representative or a chatbot

Your credit card company gave it to them. See https://www.creditcards.com/education/recurring-charges-upda...

This is essentially the reason I do my subscriptions as Apple mediated. It always feels a little dirty to prop up that situation, but it's a legit valuable service to me that they make it so easy manage subscriptions and see payment tiers _indirectly_ from the seller

Isn't it in the subscription details linked to on the account tab in your profile page? That's where it was the 2 or 3 times I've cancelled. The last time was a couple of years ago, but it looks like it was still there at the start of this year [1].

[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-cancel-disney-plus

> You must be insane if you don't use virtual credit card numbers today.

Virtual numbers protect against people stealing your number. They don't really do much against subscriptions.

If you sign up for a service and stop paying, it gets sent to collections, and then impacts your credit score because of unpaid debt. Whether you used a virtual number or not is irrelevant.

So it's not "insane" not to use virtual credit card numbers. To the contrary, it's just not usually worth the hassle. The few times my number got stolen and fraudulently used over the past two decades, I called and the transactions got reversed immediately. And those all happened after I used my card physically anyways, not online, so virtual numbers wouldn't have helped anyways.