US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

>"While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing, the procedural deficiencies of the Commission's rulemaking process are fatal here,"

As with a lot of judge rulings, and what they're always supposed to do, they ruled on what the actual law is and not just on what sounds good.

>The FTC is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect of $100 million or more. The FTC estimated in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the rule would not have a $100 million effect.

Basically the judges, and a lower court, all agreed that there's no way this rule won't have at last a $100 million in impact, and when something has that much impact there are rules they were meant to follow and didn't. And they rightly commented that if this was allowed to stand, the FTC and every government agency would just always estimate low in these cases.

That's essentially what these businesses are doing. They're taking money from people who either don't want their product, or didn't realize that they'd be charged continuously.

Just yesterday I cancelled a service, they made it very simple, until I read the very small print that said "this service is paused for 1 month". I didn't want a pause, I wanted a cancel, but how many people are being caught out by this.

I emailed them, and the CEO replied that they are changing this policy. I'll try to follow up on that in a month, but I'm not believing this on face value.

No.

The $100 million rule doesn't say that things with more than $100 million in impact cannot be regulated. It just says that more analysis is required when regulating such things.