US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

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.

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.

I think we should absolutely lower this particular bar.

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

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.

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.

> 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/

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?