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

There are so many things like this that have needed fixing for such a long time. The fact that something is happening, even slowly, is so heartening.

If your reaction is wondering if this is legal then you should be interested in the passing of new laws that make it unequivocally legal. Society should be able to govern itself.

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.

You can do this with PayPal, Google Play, and privacy.com. Probably others too, these are just the ones I've used.

The thing is that sometimes you need to actually cancel the service, not just stop paying for it, to remove your financial obligations. Depending on the contract you signed.

PayPal is not great at it. I assume you mean the settings->payments->automatic payments (https://www.paypal.com/myaccount/autopay/) feature.

Last year I had a company (DomainsPricedRight/OwnMyDomain aka GoDaddy) that I last did business (a one time purchase) with 18 years prior (2005), bill me under a new "subscription" with no input on my part.

PayPal sort of allows you to prevent that but it seems only with companies you have recently done business with.

PayPal did do a good job of email notification of the automatic payment and cancelling the "subscription" but there is no easy way to reverse the fraudulent payment, so in the end the consumer still gets burned for profit (it was only $1 but how many people had $1 stolen?)