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Continuing the Trump administration’s “No Good Things For Americans” policy framework, which has ensured grifters, cynics, and ghouls of all stripes make policy for these United States, a federal appeals court struck down the FTC’s “Click to Cancel” rule today. As the title implies, the rule, if enforced, would have required subscription services to make cancellations much easier for consumers, namely with the simple click of a mouse or tap of a finger. It would also have forced subscription services to obtain the consent of subscribers before converting auto-renewals and free trials into paid enrollments, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Alas, under the NGTFA edict, Americans must eat shit and send a certified letter, a gas bill, and the feather of a willow ptarmigan to cancel their Planet Fitness memberships.
Per The Guardian, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit struck down the rule because it found that the commission that instituted it, the Biden-era FTC, did not follow procedure. The rule that the Biden FTC missed was the requirement to present a preliminary cost-benefit analysis, which all regulations with an annual economic impact of $100 million or more must abide by. At the time, the FTC argued that the overall effect of the rule would be under the required $100 million threshold, so it did not produce the study.
In its ruling, the Court wrote that it “certainly” doesn’t endorse these “unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing,” but the “procedural deficiencies of the Commission’s rulemaking process are fatal here.” Therefore, it will allow these unfair and deceptive practices to persist, as there can be no good things for Americans anymore. Unrelatedly, last October, a media group known as the NCTA, representing Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Comcast, and more, sued the FTC over the rule, claiming that protecting consumers from obscenely powerful telecoms with unlimited resources was government overreach.
Click to Cancel was set to take effect on July 14 and would have required companies to ensure that customers could cancel services using the same mechanism they used to sign up for them. It would also have outlawed other negative marketing policies, such as interpreting inactive users as satisfied customers and forcing them into lengthy conversations with sales representatives about why they want to cancel their service. Unfortunately, the unfair and deceptive practices that have infiltrated every aspect of American life will continue unabated for the foreseeable future, and there will be no way to unsubscribe from them.
