Anti-Bureaucracy Measure Runs Into Bureaucracy

Anti-Bureaucracy Measure Runs Into Bureaucracy
Judges and administrative procedures make it hard to make it easy to cancel subscriptions.

by David Dayen July 10, 2025

If you want to sign up for a gym membership, you can make one click on its website and pay. But for many gyms, if you want to cancel, you have to go to the gym in person and find the right manager, or mail a form with a specific ask, or any of numerous other steps. The point is to make getting out of a subscription much harder than getting into it, so you’ll give up and keep paying every month.

Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission reasonably suggested that canceling subscriptions should be as easy as signing up. They issued a rule called “click to cancel” with that goal in mind. It was supposed to go into effect next week. But the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals put a stop to it, by ruling that if the FTC wanted to write a rule stopping people from having to go to the gym in person, it had to, rhetorically speaking, go to the gym in person.

In other words, onerous cancellation policies were preserved because of onerous administrative policies. And if we’re really thinking about making governance easier, the procedures executive branch agencies must endure to regulate the economy, which courts have interpreted for the benefit of big business, should top the list.

The click-to-cancel rule was challenged by just about every industry that targets potential customers with subscriptions: broadband, cable, newspapers, home security, insurance, gyms and fitness, and online advertisers (who promote the special offers that trap people in subscriptions). The National Federation of Independent Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce got involved too, in case any company offering subscriptions was left out.
https://prospect.org/justice/2025-07-10-anti-bureaucracy-measure-runs-into-bureaucracy-ftc-click-to-cancel/

Greed by any other name.