On the rare occasions when the government does want to make our lives easier, it doesn’t do a very good job at that. Case in point—the FTC’s upcoming click-to-cancel rule, which would’ve made it as easy to unsubscribe from a subscription as it is to sign up, is now dead.

A federal appeals court has struck down a highly anticipated government regulation that would have forced subscription-based businesses to provide a simple, one-step online cancellation process. The unanimous decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit found that the FTC committed critical procedural errors during the rulemaking process. The court determined that the agency, under former Democratic Chair Lina Khan, failed to conduct a required preliminary regulatory analysis, a step mandated when a new rule is projected to have an economic impact exceeding $100 million annually. Basically, the rule was thrown out because of a legal technicality, which is sadly all too common.

“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,” the court stated in its opinion. The “click-to-cancel” rule, if it ever went into effect, would have mandated that companies make the cancellation process as easy as the sign-up and accessible through the same method. This would have applied to a wide array of services, from gym memberships and streaming platforms like Amazon Prime to news subscriptions and home security services.

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Industry Groups Sue to Stop the FTC’s Click-To-Cancel Rule

Cable and internet providers, home security companies, and advertisers are suing the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over the proposed rule around canceling subscriptions. Many companies make you jump through endless hoops to cancel a subscription. As a result, some people give up and continue paying for a service they no longer need. The FTC’s new rule wants to put an end to this by requiring companies to make it easy to unsubscribe as it is to purchase a subscription in the first place.

A lot of companies make it extremely hard to unsubscribe after they already have you on file, and this is done on purpose—they want to make the process unnecessarily excruciating so most people just give up and agree to continue getting charged. So, the rule would’ve made companies cut down on this. These companies naturally sued the FTC over this, and now, it appears that the court has forced them to throw it out at long last. So, at least for now, these companies will continue to have their way.

It’s not likely that this is going to come back either, at least not in its current form. Two of the Democratic FTC commissioners who pushed the rule were fired by US President Donald Trump back in March, and the FTC is currently chaired by Republican Andrew Ferguson, whose dissenting opinion was highlighted by the court. So sadly, it looks like we’re confined to a life of annoying gym subscriptions.

Source: The Verge