US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

From a different article [1]:

> But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said the FTC erred in its rulemaking process by failing to produce a preliminary regulatory analysis, a statutory requirement for rules whose annual effect on the national economy would exceed $100 million.

> The FTC had argued that it was not required to prepare the preliminary analysis because its initial estimate of the rule’s impact on the national economy was under the $100 million threshold — even though ultimately the presiding officer determined the impact exceeded the threshold.

This is a case where congress really did pass a concrete law, and the court is requiring the FTC to follow it. Sucks that a reasonable rule is getting voided for the sloppiness but I really don't think the courts are indefensibly out of line.

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5390731-appeals-court-...

From googling apparently the "presiding officer" is appointed by the FTC chair. So it sounds like the FTC spiked its own case.

It was Lina Khan. She just felt strongly about going out the way she came in — losing every single case.

The U.S. Court of Appeals has therefore quantified the severity of this issue.

Typical decel nonsense to add all these preliminary analyses. This is CEQA/NEPA type garbage.

Fortunately, California law should be unaffected by this and that will probably be sufficient.

Normally I'm aligned but this is sort of a NEPA rule making sticking a monkeywrench in the gears creating new regulations, so I'm not totally opposed to the principle, as irritating as it is here.

Convincing. I guess I was thinking at step 1 deceleration but this actually depowers step 1 deceleration.

Ideally, we don't have all these structures slowing down societal adaptation. It's like we anneal over time, and that makes us brittle. We need to always be ready to bend to a new wind.

A major unwritten rule of american society is that there is no bigger crime than economic friction to the shareholder... including statute itself.

Illumina, Tapestry, Kroger, Lockheed Martin would disagree.

Also, didn’t she „build“ the right to repair laws?

It's interesting that businesses can build an obviously toxic subscription model that robs consumers of both money and time, but when asked to change it now we have to consider their costs.

I understand the idea behind the threshold for changing rules but this still feels very broken. There is a constant struggle of having to do everything perfectly to make any positive progress, but bad actors can operate however they like with seemingly little repercussions.

Devil is in the details, they said each company would have to pay for less than 23 hrs to a low level engineer to avoid the $100 mil impact.

How much time do you think an intern would need to render a button on screen that says "cancel" in red mapped to an already implemented function in the code base. Especially with trillions poured into the AI?

This is non sense and horse shit, and these bench full of idiots know it

These “bench full of idiots” are not blind to the fact that there are deceptive practices regarding subscriptions. FTC didn’t do their job right unfortunately and here we are. Now, new administration and it’s doubtful this will get picked up again barring any law passed by Congress.

While I share your frustration, I don't think we should lower the bar for positive progress. Because that's how one becomes a bad actor themselves.

It sounds like they did their job fine. 23 hours on average is plenty. Most companies can do this in 2 hours, and a few of them can spend a lot longer.

When bad actors have a low bar but good actors have a high bar, the country is bound to collapse. Look at how many rules the current regime is flouting. But the other side has to dot every i for some reason.

Your argument presumes that “cost” is “money spent to implement,” when in reality any reduction in predicted revenue is also a “cost.”

The cost of allowing people to cancel subscriptions is more than the cost to implement a button.

I am not getting it. The rule makes competition in markets higher. Because dollars flow to best offers faster. And thus improve economic situation, not only in markets affected by rule, but also on all other markets, in case customer wants to take his money elsewhere.

And on international scale, because more competitive companies presumably out-compete foreign competitors.

So, FTC needs some permission and review to make national economy money?

I think we should absolutely lower this particular bar.

There’s a non trivial chance this interacts with credit card processing. There is also app the legal liability of you tell someone meet are cancelled and continue charging them. So probably so not something you trust an intern to do.

The bar should be where changes happen to move in the correct direction easily, while moving in the incorrect direction harder. If the rule was to "force companies to have confusing cancel processes", the rulemaking process would have zero burdens, because the "potential gains" of doing so would be enormous.

Are we still talking about click-to-cancel here? There aren't 'other sides' in any meaningful sense on this sort of administrative decision. There is a solid consensus that people shouldn't have to pay for subscriptions they don't want and a couple of broadly inconsequential points to debate on how to implement it.

This is exactly the sort of situation where just following all the rules and procedures is fine and it doesn't, within a pretty broad range of outcomes, who gets final say.

The FTC was not given unlimited rule-making power by Congress, and has to live within the power granted to them.

Issuing an NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) and conducting a regulatory analysis for certain rules are examples of such limits. The FTC did not follow the second (as was required) in this case.

Whether I happen to agree with the change they enacted (I do) doesn’t change the fact that I want my government agencies to follow the rules laid out for them. Because as surely as the sun rises in the east, sooner or later they’ll propose a rule I don’t agree with and I want there to be a lawful process and framework in place then, and therefore also now.

This is stuff that companies already handle with their current cancellation pipelines. Hooking up a short circuit that flags whatever user in their DB as having cancelled is something that I would absolutely toss a junior engineer at and expect them to finish in three or so working days, maybe slightly longer.

The only way it's more onerous than that is if companies have an absolutely shit design under the hood, or they're using malicious compliance to argue that this feature specifically needs eight weeks of planning poker and at least five senior engineers to sign off on each iteration of the design phase.

The "other side" here is the political group that is consistently anti-regulation, anti-consumer, anti-government.

There is a new FTC administration.

I interpret this as being the incoming FTC wanted to kill this but not withdrawal (due to bad optics).

They wanted to lose the case and did so by changing a judgment they controlled so that the rule could fail a legal procedural challenge.

That is easy to say. However I don't think you can define "correct direction" in a useful way that also gets at what you mean. Every definition you can come up with someone will find a loop hole that fits the letter of your definition, while it is against what you mean.

By putting process in place for rules we give us time to notice bad rule proposals and give us a process to stop them.

Sure, 23 hours on average is generous if the goal is honest implementation. But the issue isn’t the time. It is that companies don’t want this button to exist at all. They are not stalling because it's hard; they’re stalling because friction equals profit. That’s why you get weaponized complexity, endless “design reviews” and inflated estimates. The FTC did their job, sort of. They got “cancelled” (hehe) because of a bureaucratic hurdle.

The industry just doesn’t want to play fair.

The "other side" does not consider themselves anti-consumer. You disagree with them on what anti-consumer means, but they have their own reasons to consider their position pro-consumer and you are doing debate a disservice by ignoring that.

They do consider themselves anti-regulation and anti-government in general, but they are not (mostly) anarchists, they do agree with some regulation and government, they just want the minimum possible and thus place a high bar on how bad the alternatives must be before they will agree to regulation/government.

It better fits the facts that the incoming FTC wants this, but they want to do the job right. At least some of the incoming FTC was in place when they rule was passed in the first place and their statements then say they wanted the rule but they wanted the correct procedures done so that it would stand up in court.

Just testing this should take more than 23 hours for non-trivial code. Ship it and pray it works is not a good plan when if the code doesn't work the government will be coming after you.

>The rule makes competition in markets higher. Because dollars flow to best offers faster.

That's an insufficiently nuanced view of how competition works. Imagine two companies offering otherwise identical services, at identical price points, except that one company starts to offer click to cancel and the other does not. What happens next?

It's possible the other company implements it too. But it's also possible the other company lowers its prices, trading profit margin for trade stickiness. Enforcing click to cancel wouldn't give the other company the option to respond in the way it sees best.

> If the rule was to "force companies to have confusing cancel processes", the rulemaking process would have zero burdens

I can't speak to hypotheticals with certainty, but a straightforward reading of this law is that it would have exactly the same regulatory process requirements as the requirement to remove them.

Rules that give leeway to act when consumer costs are estimated to be above a certain threshold, instead of when company costs are below a certain threshold would be a much better, if still imperfect, rule that would satisfy the “correct direction in a useful way”.

Just off the top of my head, you could have a rule that if some business activity is estimated to cost consumers $100 million or more, then FTC can implement it instead of looking at the cost to companies. The “average US household” spends $200 a year on forgotten or unused subscriptions [1], if even 10% of those are due to a lack of click to cancel, that is $2.6 billion per year.

[1] https://thedesk.net/2025/05/cnet-subscription-survey-2025/

If they wanted to change how they implement the rule they could have withdrawn it rather than continue to an adverse judgement in court.

Basically the FTC is required to go through a lengthy (probably multi-year) impact analysis if they determine that the rule will cause more than $100 million in impact to the US economy.

The previous administration determined that this rule would not meet the threshold, allowing quick implementation. The current administration then said "actually we think this would meet the threshold" giving the court an excuse to strike the rule down.

If the trump administration is correct that trapping people in gotya-contracts by making it difficult to cancel really constitutes $100 million of economic activity in the US, I think that says that there's something truly rotten about the basis of our economy.

You would have attacked them for withdrawing the rule as well. You have setup a can't win situation and then are attacking someone for losing.

If Liberals really wanted this rule they would have followed the law. Evidence is the conservatives when this was passed objected because the law was not being followed. They were then left in this can't win situation.

In general the better experience will command higher price, right. That is true, and by forcing same lowest level on everyone we are constructing artificial floor on how bad an experience can be.

Or at least ensuring that bad experience is so profitable that the competitor is ready to even pay the fee for violations.

Illegal markets operate in this territory. No consumer protection there, sorry.

I started to understand the question more, thank you for your comment

I would have criticized them for getting rid of a rule that protects consumers, yes.

But it would have been far more honest than what they've done here, where they set up a kabuki theater legal defense so that they can avoid the bad politics of killing a very good rule to protect monied special interests.

Always happy to facilitate deeper understanding, even when I disagree with you. No problem!

I for one was definitely speaking about the general case, not this particular case. My point was that due process is not, generally speaking, a bad thing - even if it means that "progress" is sometimes a little slow to come by.

Thanks for chiming in and pointing this out. I, too, am frustrated by the setback of this nullification.

In my original comment, I was talking about the general case for due process. "Progress" is almost as useless a category as "good" and "bad".

Debates have become astonishingly partisan.

Do they actually consider themselves pro-consumer, do they lie and say that, or do they keep quiet about it and let you assume that?