NYC's "Click to Cancel" rule is now in effect
nyc.gov
nyc.gov
I expect more businesses will transition to this strategy to counter NYC's new rule. They won't necessarily lower the price, but you will have to sign up for a one-year term, then they will hit you with a massive cancellation fee if you "click to cancel".
They're building a free, open-source Adobe Creative Suite alternative entirely in Rust. It runs super fast with minimal overhead, works completely offline, and aims for near 1:1 feature parity with Adobe products like Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. It also supports command-based actions, making it easy to integrate into AI agents and automated workflows. They have Microsoft Office alternatives too.
Their Photoshop clone, PhotoCraft (https://github.com/storytold/photocraft), has around 47k GitHub stars right now.
not these llm vibe coded shit.
All three original apps contained each other's functionality. As a result, the new combined app is barely larger than one of the three previous apps, and switching between the modes is now much more convenient and has a better UX.
Insert Michael Scott "God no" meme
That's terrible news. I only use photo-editing software to lay stuff out for print once in a while, so hopefully I can get away without upgrading indefinitely.
No. No it's not.
Fort all of Adobe's faults, Photoshop and other offerings are products, with support timelines, features added etc. [1] This so far is "let me vibe-code some thing with no intention of maintaining it further".
[1] And there are others competing as well. From opensource like Gimp to Affinity Design, Pixelmator etc.
Or to actually try and maintain/change/fix vibe-coded software for longer than a few days.
No, AI isn't subsuming products. Not now, not in the forseeable future.
And software developer's perspective on this is exactly how future looks, because for me, Claude Code now manages my personal computer fully - installs new software as needed, and uses it as needed.
Oh, I highly doubt this. Since I use ChatGPT for generating images quite often. There's no chance in hell they are doing consistent high-quality work in ChatGPT 90% of the time. Or your (and their) definition of high quality work is far from a common definition.
This is especially true in the past few months when OpenAI removed any way to directly prompt their image generator. So ChatGPT is often stuck in the same generator seed, the generator never gets the full prompt, regenerates images (inconsistently), messes up details, ignores input (because the model never generates the prompt to the image generating model correctly) etc. etc.
Good enough to generate a restaurant slop-menu or a quick TTRPG image. Consistent high quality? Lol.
Because if i try signing up on their website today, the difference seems pretty clear to me.
But nobody wants to take personal responsibility for consciously choosing the cheaper monthly option. It comes with the annual commitment, as opposed to the more expensive monthly option that does not have the annual commitment.
I have zero love for Adobe, but at the same time in this particular case it really is people wanting to have their cake and eat it too. They want the cheapest monthly price, but also the ability to cancel.
If you think you might need to cancel, that's what the monthly option is for.
As for why they would set things up like this? Who the frak knows? Pricing tiers is literally the primary means of legally scamming people. The only logic it follows is that people who believe it does follow obvious logic are easier to scam.
I think that's handled by the rule. From their webpage:
> Companies must clearly explain subscription terms to you
Does this law apply retroactively?
You wouldn't have a claim under the "straightforward cancellation process" part–same way this law doesn't enable one to walk away from a long-term lease for shits and giggles. But you may under the "clearly explain subscription terms to you" bit.
I bet going forward everyone will prominently implement a fake massive discount or waive a fake one time fee when signing up just to have something to claw back if you ever want to cancel.
P.S. Just checked Adobe's site from the EU, prominently displays a "Save 50%" badge and a crossed out original price with the discounted price next to it. There's also a link to the cancellation policy which tells you exactly what to expect for a refund. The cancellation process itself looks 1-click. Hard to claim misinformation.
This reminds me of the ISPs where the technician would insist to plug in your internet cable and a "check" that took all of 5s but was billed heavily in a waived one time fee. When you wanted to cancel the contract they'd ask for that fee back.
Most gyms, ISPs, mobile carriers, any sort of services with continuous subscription have this scheme:
- they sell you subscription with some ridiculous (and perpetual) discount (often with “first three months - it’s free”);
- there’s minimum commitment clauses/fines (so you won’t leave too early);
- there’s clause to “pay up all given discounts on canceling the contract”;
- they “balance” two rules above in such a way that it is never “good time” to leave.
They should for sure list the annual price and the monthly price but it's not "burried".
If I see: "Annual Subscription - $120/year, billed $10/month" I assume I'm paying $120 even if I cancel after 6 months.
But, if I cancel after 6 months, and the message to me is "$60 cancellation fee", I'm very confused - I thought I was paying the remaining $60 I owe them...? The amount may be the same but it's confusing nonetheless.
The messaging has usually been something like: "Annual subscription cancelled at the end of current period. Access ends on 12/31/2026" (even if today is 6/1/2026)
That's why the "cancellation fee" comment is weird to me - there's no need to message that way, since "pay the rest of the committed period" seems to be a common (and at least to me, very understandable) way to handle this.
Even with monthly services, I don't think I've ever had an immediate loss of access - it's there until the end of the billing cycle. As it should be, IMO. The only exception would be if I force-deleted my account as well as that's a very explicit "I'm done-done" signal to the service provider.
Buried prices are the next frontier of consumer protection. I've gotten burned by looking up a store product online and then when attempting to purchase finding that unless you ordered it through the site for in-store pickup, you get a higher price. Car dealerships were the same the last time I bought one. And while I appreciate Tesla's challenge in expressing TCO, subtracting average fuel costs from the price of a car smells bad in the same way.
>Fee applies of half your remaining annual commitment if you cancel after Nov 01
and for the prepaid option
>No refund if you cancel after Nov 01
https://www.adobe.com/#mini-plans-web-cta-creative-cloud-car...
Adobe as a huge market leader won't be affected, but I don't know how many other studios will get away with that.
It's worse than that. They don't even offer a monthly subscription contract - it's purely annual, but they advertise and promote monthly with fine print.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/894555/adobe-75-million-doj-se...
* Annual plan, paid monthly
* Annual plan, prepaid
* Monthly plan
And this is how I remember it back when, I signed up for a short gig where I only needed it for 3 months and went for the monthly plan, and then when the gig became a contract I switched to the annual paid monthly.
I think what changed is now the plans page says upfront "early termination fees apply" right next to the price.
(Compare the city’s historic problems around preventing illegal de-stabilization of rental units, inability to prevent the NYPD from parking on sidewalks, and so forth.)
This is why the sidewalks next to city parks take forever to get shoveled after a big snow storm.
It only works for idling trucks because the person letting the truck idle is almost never the owner and the person idling the truck is usually doing work so they're not around to notice they're being reported and there's a lot more public apetite for enforcement against businesses than the general public and they write it off as a cost of doing business.
If you open up the floodgates of anyone v anyone that generic parking enforcement entails I give it about a week before some "super reporter" gets curb stomped by an uber driver who's having a bad day. And then you'll have public scrutiny, the tough question that come with that and the entire program is likely to be walked back as a result.
For consumer-corporate disputes, learning to leverage New York's regulatory state is a bit of a superpower. Basically, sending in a written complaint with the regulator copied and then having them open a regulatory-investigatory file is real leverage because even if you're full of shit, it's going to burn legal dollars on the other side. That, in turn, makes a letter to the company threatening regulatory escalation as the next step land seriously.
What needs to happen for rules like this is: 1. the complaint should be easy/automatic to validate and rule on, 2. hard for the company to appeal and stonewall, and 3. the fine money should go to the person who filed the complaint as a bounty to motivate people to look for violators.
(It's worth noting that the city does sometimes enforce new regulations well, and in a way that the public is aware of. For example, businesses in the city are required to accept hard cash as payment, and the penalties for not doing so can be significant. Friends have told me that the city is very proactive about responding to those complaints. Anecdotally, the city has also become much better about responding to some forms of illegal parking and idling over the past few years. It certainly helps when the incentives are aligned, i.e. the cost of the enforcement program is supported by the fines collected.)
Failing to provide salary transparency in job postings is another common one with zero enforcement.
Assuming that you pay with a credit card, I would assume you could dispute the charge on the basis that they're violating the law and win any faceoff immediately on that basis.
The example of a yearly subscription paid monthly should make this obvious. You can't exit this arrangement after 6 months and expect to simply not pay the remaining 6 months, as the contract was for a whole year. All this law does is force the business to make it easy for you to cancel any auto-renew for a second year. But if the business doesn't do that and you dispute a payment, how hard do you expect your bank to work to figure out if this payment was for a part of the original contract, or for an auto-renewal you should have been able to easily canceled, but haven't?
My point would be that the argument would be clear. It stands to reason that a business cannot consider an unlawfully collected payment to be legitimate. If you can demonstrate that you attempted to give them notice of cancellation and they ignored it unlawfully, then that's your justification that the payment wasn't authorized. You can, of course, revoke authorization to collect payment anytime you want.
This is a really common kind of dispute that businesses have with credit card users. Typically, their response is that the user did, in fact, authorize it because they agreed to a variety of terms that mandated this and that for cancellation, and so on and so forth. In essence, if they can get the user to admit that they gave the original authorization, their argument would be that it was never withdrawn because the user previously agreed to some T&C buried definition of how cancellation would be defined.
The counter to that, of course, now, is new, which is to say that those terms are unlawful and thus negated. It seems completely sound to me as a strategy.
However, if a business fails to do so, and the only way they have to cancel your subscription is via, say, a notarized letter, I don't see how you can convince your bank that you tried to unsubscribe unless you have sent such a notarized letter.
Typically, the way it would work is that they would say, "You authorized it," and you would say, "Actually, I didn't authorize that payment. I only authorized the prior payments. I never authorized the subsequent ones because I logged in to their site and attempted to cancel, but they did not provide me with a means to do so."
To which they could say no your initial authorization should also apply to these subsequent charges because that cancellation method is not one we accept. In the past, that defense could work. Your NEW counterargument would be: Sorry, but they cannot rely on and profit from unlawful behavior.
The contract as you signed it might well contain a clause that explicitly says you have to perform arcane rituals to stop the subscription: now you have to have the bank analyze the law in your place of residence on whether the contract itself might be illegal. I do not live in the USA and don't have experience with the credit card dispute system, but I personally doubt that this level of legal analysis would be performed by the bank for your, free of charge even.
I have no doubt that you would win this in court, by the way.
Source: I'm an EU digital policy analyst in Brussels.
Continue the story. (keep reading); Continue the trial. (suspend)
Drop the album. (release); Drop the charges. (abandon)
Sanction an event. (approve); Sanction a country. (penalize)
Cleave to principles. (stick); Cleave wood. (split)
Clip keys to belt. (attach); Clip the hedges. (cut off)
Dust shelves. (remove); Dust pastries with sugar. (add)
Hold fast. (fixed in place); Walk fast. (moving quickly)
Make oversight. (omission); Provide oversight. (scrutiny)
Peruse the ancient manuscript. (read in detail); Peruse the magazine. (look through casually)
The alarm went off. (activated); Turn the alarm off. (deactivated)
It's yet to be found. (not found); Yet it's found. (found)
They're all but forgotten. (nearly); They're known but to God. (only)
I guess I am just unable to parse the words to piece together such a meaning. In my mind, there are two ways to interpret it: "this subject may be all kinds of things, but one thing it is not" (all but = everything except), or the opposite "this subject may be all kinds of things, but one thing it is for sure". And neither of these means "nearly" :(
You've walked all but the last step of the journey.
It seems like plain speech could be used, but this profoundly-irrational jargon was selected instead.
A table (if there even is one present at all) seems like about the least important part of a group discussion of an idea.
In contrast to the UK meaning which seems to be to take the topic from a briefcase under the table and place it for discussion on the table in front of everyone.
I was really hoping for the EU to be more strict in enforcement. Guess they don't feel so strong in trade negotiations right now.
Here in the US, there is also the problem that people are way too overcome with FOMO about the dumbest stuff. I knew someone who would hit "Accept all" instantly for every dialog, and then I helped her with something and clicked the (mostly required and reliable) "Reject all" button instead, and when the site just loaded up and worked after that, she was shocked and said "I didn't know you could do that"
I don't know how to respond to that! The dialog openly tells you every single time that only the "Necessary" cookies are required and you can't turn those off, and every other option can be turned off.
People just don't read! Ever! At all! Their life could depend on it and they would panic instead of just reading one damn sentence in a dialog box and at this point I no longer accept "The industry trained them this way" as an excuse since this affects multiple generations who had dramatically different computing experiences.
In the modern day, every single American can usually access information about anything they want. They can try to answer any question they have. They can try and clear up anything confusing to them. They can form educated opinions!
They watch TikTok instead
My guess is age verification + ID to access social media, "inappropriate" games, etc.
> “Dark patterns” (also called deceptive or manipulative design) are interface choices that steer users towards decisions they would not otherwise make, for example:
> Making the “accept all” option bright and prominent, but hiding “reject” or “manage settings”
Not a direct reference, but it's clear exactly what it's getting at.
Wouldn't call it a big win though. If it's not established as a browser level setting instead of some shitty per-website banner that expires every 3 weeks as the site adjusts its ad serving system once again? We're still in cookie law hell.
Isn't this already illegal? By law the websites are required to make full opt out single click. They just don't care.
Honestly all these kinds of laws should take an example out of EU261 (the flight compensation regulation) book. Set statutory damages and allow private right of action. Air carriers certainly have started to follow law much harder than many other industries after people realized they could fairly easily get compensation when carriers didn't fulfill their obligations.
games will be regulated and cant be easily shut down. Lets see what "Stop killing games" will say.
edit: According above website had too optimistic interpretation. Anyway it looks like Stop Killing Game transforms into pro-consumer video games association. And thats overdue and yet very interesting and missing.
This is a consistent pattern. I've seen people praise him for the use of snow melters (they use them most blizzards), praise him for switching to garbage bins (the decision to switch happened under Adams), praise him for putting his desk backwards to send a message of solidarity (the desk was not backwards, it just has drawers on both sides), etc.
He seems like a decent mayor, but there are a lot of overeager boosters who have warped him into some miracle maker. It reminds me a bit of when Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in the enthusiasm after his election — it's nice to feel like a politician is "your guy", but don't get too swept up in it!
Don't communicate what you do -> "what did they even do?"
they dropped a piano on a CRS's head and all his teeth turned to piano keys. does their perfidy know no bounds?
The French gov't also announced the "Five Point Plan". There are lots of good details here[1].
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/05/from-school-blockades-to...
then again, it's wild that it took such large scale protests for Lecornu to commit to filling long-vacant teaching posts, ensuring school buildings are fit for human occupation with functioning sanitary facilities, and implementing basic reforms to the notoriously bad university application system. my expectations from Matignon were always low but,
Michael Bloomberg launched NYC311 in 2003. 311 has fielded millions of calls in the last twenty years. A huge part of 311 is being able to report quality of life issues. Plus Bloomberg made it easier to build, which unleashed a massive development wave in Manhattan and Brooklyn. More homes to house people, and more offices to grow the economy.
Bill de Blasio started Universal Pre-Kindergarten and reduced Stop-and-Frisk by 90%.
Eric Adams was a doofus and will soon be forgotten.
The last productive mayor New York had was Bloomberg. Then we had a leftist idiot (who did, granted, pass universal pre-K). Then we had a reactionary centrist muppet (who did, granted, pass some decent pro-development policies). So over a decade of bad executives coming to power with one or two good ideas that they implemented in their first year and then became pests.
Imagine if you will an America were every vote counted equally. The GOP would actually have to campaign in the cities and cater to urban voters.
New York has elected independents (Bloomberg and Republicans (Giuliani) to Gracie Manor. Staten Island tends to swing that way in general. It’s really only post-Iraq War that New York went pretty much permanently Democrat, a fate sealed by the collapse of the GOP into MAGA.
> other party in America literally hates New York
Trump is a New Yorker. I haven’t seen that much hate for it compared with the California metropolises.
Mamdani simply has better PR.
Then he lied about the COVID numbers so he could write a shitty book about how great of a governor he was around that time. That seems decidedly ineffective to me, unless the goal was to kill people I guess. He sucked, we're good to be rid of him.
He sucked. He probably still does.
[1] If the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent.
> the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent
I’m cautiously doubtful. We lost control for a reason. And the current MTA is pretty well run, especially if you include commuter rail in the mix.
I guess I don't concede that he did anything competently, or at least more competently than any other politician would be.
Do you have a source or dataset that shows this delineation? (Not challenging you, genuinely curious.)
Non-paywalled: https://web.archive.org/web/20180103141201/https://www.nytim...
> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.
> “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”
To be fair, a lot of the bullshit slush-fundiness of the MTA predates Cuomo. Still, this article was 2017, six years after his tenure started and since the MTA is the states responsibility, it was his responsibility.
ETA:
That particular anecdote appears to be from 2010, so admittedly before Cuomo took power. I still think it's fair to blame him for the subway not significantly improving in the nearly ten years he was in office.
I will totally agree with you that Cuomo—nor Hochul—did anything around improving the MTA’s fiscal efficiency. I’m just not convinced he even accelerates that.
But that's kind of what I'm getting at; I don't concede that he was effective.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...
So many other similar examples, like Bank Overdraft Fee Caps, Credit card late fees, personal data safeguards, and so much more.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/giuliani-accu...
Then there's the defamation lawsuits that he lost:
$148,000,000 for Georgian election workers:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trial-over-rudy-giulia...
And $1,300,000,000 for Dominion Voting Systems:
Doubled the police force and cut crime in half, including murders down 66%, shootings down 72%
Zero-tolerance policy against public disorder, panhandling and public nuisance crimes (unheard of today!)
Cleaned up times square transforming from a seedy red light district into a major tourist destination
Converted a $2.3 billion city budget deficit into a $2.9 billion surplus
Reduced or eliminated 23 different city taxes, saving taxpayers over $9 billion
Overhauled the welfare system, helping people get jobs and successfully moved over 600K people off assistance
Led NYC and USA through the immediate aftermath of 9/11
Earned the title America's Mayor, Time magazine Person of the Year and an honorary knighthoodThis type of thing should never have been up to the mayor of any city to legislate.
So if a startup lets someone sign up using Stripe, for example, does this mean that they need to have a way to unsubscribe that is as easy as Stripe? Lots of companies have a way to unsubscribe electronically, but it requires logging in to your account, going into settings, saying you want to unsub, and possibly declining various offers to stay.
Surely at some point a company could cross the line of "a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism the consumer used to provide consent". But where is the line exactly? Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform, but at the same time surely it can't be hidden 8 levels down in the settings.
Some examples would be helpful to let businesses and consumers know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
You say:
> I honestly don't think this is one is hard to understand at all. If you can sign up through the web you should be able to cancel through the web.
If that's all they were trying to do, they would just say that it has to be the same medium. But they don't stop there. They say you have to have a "simple cancellation mechanism" and it has to be "as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent". Then they layer on the same-medium requirement that you think is the only actual requirement.
I've read a lot of rules, laws and regulations in my day (lawyer), so I know that when there are 3 distinct requirements, then you can't just meet one of them and think you're in compliance.
Ah, that explains everything.
I do believe you're commenting in good faith. The problem is, your profession requires you to be extremely explicit to a degree that nobody else in the world needs.
To a lawyer, there's no such thing as the Spirit of the Law, all that matters is the Letter, so you need incredibly rigid definitions to ensure no loopholes. Unfortunately, to people that don't know you're a lawyer, you asking questions comes off as feigning misunderstanding, rather than demanding a concrete, specific, rigid, and precise definition.
Unfortunately, it's also why people fucking hate lawyers. Ya'll know what a law is supposed to say, but weaponize language in order to invent ambiguity that any sane person would say isn't there, and as a result, a law that should only be 4 sentences ends up being 4 pages full of synonyms in order to make sure there's no loopholes.
When a mom yells at a kid, "Stop jumping on the bed!", and the kid says "I'm not jumping, I'm hopping!", you know that kids is gonna grow up to be a lawyer.
What bothers me most is that these companies are actively deviating from the ordinary, obvious, symmetrical path in order to fleece customers. So to comply with the law is really to stop going out of their way to commit petty, pervasive, stochastic fraud against their customers. That is, it doesn't require positive action so much as negative action. Which makes it even less objectionable.
The other day I went to cancel Comcast. And you know what? I first logged into my acount. From there I could literally do everything instantly - sign up, add services, upgrade, everything - but I couldn't cancel. There was no button, no link, no wording. I had to Google it. And it was a phone number hidden on their website that was business hours only. And I called it and spent ~10 minutes cancelling my service. Comcast had to ideate, design, implement, staff, build organization around this behavior. Its transparently wrong, it's too common, and it's a practice that should be stopped.
The lack of examples/specificity makes it easier for the government to capriciously enforce this law against companies they disfavor. I'm surprised that on a startup-friendly forum, most of the comments are from folks who are worried about malicious companies, not malicious enforcement.
I totally hear you on Comcast. I've filed FCC complaints against them several times. But these rules apply equally to very small companies, who may not have the resources to make sure that they're in compliance with the spirit and letter of every rule in 50 states and 100 countries.
― Upton Sinclair
Adobe's call centers have a script where they offer some "bargain" deal if you don't cancel which converts your for-real-monthly-with-no-cancellation-penalty subscription into one that has an annual requirement and a "cancellation fee" that is in effect the rest of the year's subscription charge.
My local paper on the west coast is owned now by USA Today. They often have specials (digital edition for $8 for only 6 months) sales. Takes a CC, and a few clicks. If you go past that time, you get switched to the $15/month subscription.
But to cancel the digital version of the local paper, I have to call customer service, that is based out of the east coast, that seems to be open from 9-4 east coast time. And then of course, they try to get me to change my mind, bargain with me, etc.
its bad enough, last time I used privacy.com, and set a max limit, and just ignored their emails about my card declining. and they are ALMOST as bad a cirrusXM was when our free trial with a new car was expiring.
Unless there were several efforts to get you to think twice before subscribing, clearly trying to get you to think twice before unsubscribing is not as easy to use.
Personally I really appreciate it when a service sends me an email or to reminding me of an upcoming renewal and making sure I have a chance to cancel. It tells me that they’re not hoping for or relying on users forgetting their subscriptions to make money, which imparts am image of integrity.
The only reason any company would have trouble complying with this rule is if they want to abuse customers to keep them from canceling when they want to cancel. The amount of sympathy I have towards such companies requires advanced scientific notation to quantify.
No extra hoops at all.
To signup they just went to foo.com and there was list of plans with links to their sign up pages right there, so click one of those, fill out the one page form, click submit.
To cancel, they have to go to foo.com, click the login link, full in the login form, click to submit, then on their home page click on the profile icon to get the profile menu, click account in that menu, and then click the cancel button on the account page.
That's 2 clicks to sign up and 5 to cancel--6 if the cancel button asks if you are sure.
To cancel: enter your email and password, cancel.
What am I missing?
This is what courts are for. There is no exact line because many situations are different.
Surely you don't have to have a big red cancel button on every page of your platform
Why not?
Some examples would be helpful
The text you quoted is clear enough to me, and it's probably clear to any reasonable person (most rules are written this way). If you're worried about gaming the system to find the exact process that just on the "legal" side of things, you probably aren't reasonable.
So now you’ve opened a bunch of businesses up to liability from an upset customer who files a complaint, even if they are making a good faith effort to follow this law.
That is why clear and specific details should be in the law, not vague hand wavy things that require lawyers and judges to interpret.
For example, finding a loophole to keep it difficult unsubscribe. Or making it easy to unsubscribe, but adding an egregious cancellation fee to all subscriptions.
Another good example is when NYC passed minimum pay laws for delivery drivers, and the big delivery companies immediately all colluded to hide the normal tip screen behind a bunch of submenus (until eventually forced to change it back).
Is it really unclear to you what the intent is here? What specifically about the rule do you think is ambiguous?
IL has had click-to-cancel since 2022. (Actually 2000, but updated in 2022, with continuous amendments being put forward all the time.)
Not sure if it was the only cause, but in a month since then, conversion rates 2x'd (~100/mo to ~250/mo), while % of cancel/refund requests have stayed the same.
Then again, the lobbying and resistance from Chrome must be unreal because it would be pretty huge blow for them to enable such setting.
It's a really big chunk.
We will see a patchwork regime, where companies make it easy to cancel if you’re in NYC or another jurisdiction with similar rules, but difficult otherwise. When you see this, you must remember that the easiest thing would have been to make it easy for everyone to cancel regardless of location. That would be perfectly legal and it would be the cheapest option to build. If a company didn’t do that it’s because they made a deliberate choice to spend more money just so they could continue screwing some people over.
Lina Khan's FTC passed a rule to make click-to-cancel nationwide in 2024.
It was killed on procedural grounds by the highly conservative Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The take-away from how it was killed boils down to "we (companies) know that we'd lose more than $100 million dollars if people could reasonably unsubscribe rather than deal with our dark patterns".
The old FTC would have been able to fix the procedural problem, but then Trump took office and gutted the FTC and destroyed all the good work it was doing.
Since the federal government is failing us, I support local governments doing the right thing. If enough do, companies will eventually be forced into compliance nationally because it won't be worth the complexity to have hundreds of regional carve-outs.
So I provided a fake address in California, and it was done.
Unfortunately that's how things work these days sometimes.
So close yet so far
Just find the charge, click the "I want to cancel the service that caused this charge". The merchant has to either cancel or reply with a message clearly explaining why they can't do that (i.e. you agreed to a 12-month minimum).
Whoever is collecting the money has all the information needed to make the cancellation request. No website logins, passwords, self-addressed stamped envelope, etc.
Apple has done this for subscriptions that collect money through the iTunes store. It's awesome.
AmEx should do this because unlike all the other cards they control the whole stack.
Opening a dispute is like stopping payment on a check. It's refusing to pay, not asking to cancel.
New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices
1. If non-money sub, categorize its content and create a P1 watch event and a set of follow up actions.
2. If its a money/trial sub, create a P0 watch event and its own set of followup actions.
All watch events are queued for me by priority where i ask on the weekend: "Tell me P0 events", it then asks me what action. The ergonomic factor here is I the human can tune this valve on the information hose. There is also a dashboard for P0 notifications and an android push notification that notifies me of P0 events, but they aren't "consumed" until i decide. There are tons of places this can be useful: make progress on non-work related todos, systematic investment, writing year-end reviews.
None of this is rocket science.
**Local service webhooks are the key: Every web-hook has some kind of decision maker in it - an LLM + deterministic logic.