NYC Passes Click To Cancel Rules As Lina Khan Lives On

Legal Issues

from the deregulatory-dysfunction dept

In late 2024 the Biden FTC under Lina Khan passed new “click to cancel” rules that made it easier to cancel subscriptions and services, promising to punish the worst offenders. It was a direct response to decades of sleazy behavior from companies (from AOL to the Wall Street Journal) that made cancelling services an overly complicated, gargantuan pain in the ass.

But we’re living in the golden age of corruption.

Before they could take effect, the rules were summarily executed by the 8th Circuit court of appeals, stocked with Trump appointees. The court sided with gym companies, marketing firms, and insurance companies who sued to stop the rule, part of a effort under Trumpism to declare U.S. regulators entirely toothless, decorative, and incapable of doing literally anything that upsets corporate power.

But the rules are now living on in New York City, where Lina Khan has advised new Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani’s office last week announced Executive Orders 9 and 10, which not only ban all hidden junk fees, but implement a “click to cancel” rule that guarantees consumers can cancel subscriptions as easily as they sign up for them:

“For years, companies have built their business model around making it harder for working people to hold onto their money,” said Mayor Mamdani. “Whether it’s hidden fees that suddenly appear at checkout or subscriptions that take one click to sign up for and a dozen steps to cancel, the result is the same: working people pay more while corporations profit. That ends now. If you can sign up with one click, you can cancel with one click.”

While promising, enforcement will matter. States and municipalities have a proud history of announcing something like this, then failing badly to engage in enforcement. Often because taking on deep-pocketed companies is costly and time consuming, and an uphill challenge for many states or municipalities with no limit of fires to put out in the Trump era (the whole reason you need a federal government).

You’ve probably seen this sort of thing on the “right to repair” front, where states will announce bold new “right to repair” laws that protect consumers from corporate efforts to monopolize repair, only to result in nobody bothering to enforce them. Or they’ll announce bold to efforts to ban stuff like junk fees, but exempt most of the problematic industries (like Illinois just did).

Still, it’s nice to see somebody care about an issue I’ve written about for the better part of two decades. It’s worth noting that other efforts from the Biden era to protect consumers from sleazy fees — like the FCC’s attempted broadband “nutrition label” — were also quickly demolished by the Trump administration and their corporate friends.

You’re going to be seeing a lot of this sort of thing as the federal government creaks and collapses under the weight of corruption and our extremist courts. The onus of consumer protection (and labor rights, public safety, environmental issues, etc.) is now falling entirely into the laps of municipalities and states, resulting in a patchwork of more localized and inconsistently enforced rules.

Corporations and self-proclaimed anti-regulation “free market” entrepreneurs will then whine incessantly about said patchwork of inconsistent oversight, hoping you’ll ignore that their corruption, lobbying, greed, and regulatory capture disemboweled federal governance and pissed off the voters in the first place, creating the very thing they’re angry about.

For example, a bunch of right wing and libertarian rich brats found it immeasurably insufferable that a woman (Lina Khan) was engaged in things like antitrust reform, banning noncompetes, and outlawing junk fees. So they embraced corrupt fascism. The problems caused by fascism is directly fueling support for democratic socialism, which the rich brats are now whining about incessantly, oblivious that their greedy disdain for even the most modest of federal corporate accountability was the catalyst for it all.

Filed Under: click to cancel, consumers, deregulation, fees, lina khan, nyc, regulatory capture, surcharges, zohran mamdani