{"id":51608,"date":"2025-07-09T14:31:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-09T14:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/51608\/"},"modified":"2025-07-09T14:31:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T14:31:08","slug":"appeals-court-strikes-down-click-to-cancel-rule","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/51608\/","title":{"rendered":"Appeals court strikes down \u2018click-to-cancel\u2019 rule"},"content":{"rendered":"

A federal appeals court just threw out a new government regulation that would have required subscription services to give consumers an easy way to cancel.<\/p>\n

The Federal Trade Commission\u2019s click-to-cancel rule was set to take effect next week<\/a>, and would have required<\/a> everything from your gym membership to Amazon Prime subscription to let customers cancel their recurring payments as easily as they signed up, and through the same method.<\/p>\n

Last fall, industry groups representing companies that benefit from subscription revenue \u2014 including cable providers, entertainment studios, advertising companies, and home security firms \u2014 sought to block the rule in court<\/a>, arguing the FTC aimed to \u201cregulate consumer contracts for all companies in all industries and across all sectors of the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in a unanimous ruling<\/a> by a three-judge panel for the Eighth Circuit, the court found that the FTC under former Democratic Chair Lina Khan erred so gravely in its roll-out of the rule that it needs to be thrown out altogether. \u201cWhile we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing, the procedural deficiencies of the Commission\u2019s rulemaking process are fatal here,\u201d the court wrote. Even though parts of the rule were technically salvageable, the court continued, vacating the entire rule is appropriate \u201cbecause of the prejudice suffered by Petitioners as a result of the Commission\u2019s procedural error.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Eighth Circuit found that the agency skipped steps to issue the rule, including depriving stakeholders of \u201ca notable opportunity to dissuade the FTC from adopting the Rule as proposed.\u201d Even though the court said the FTC\u2019s decision to skip some analysis \u201cwas certainly not made in bad faith,\u201d it found that the petitioners \u201chave raised \u2018enough uncertainty whether [their] comments would have had some effect if they had been considered,\u2019 especially in the context of a closely divided Commission vote that elicited a lengthy dissenting statement.\u201d<\/p>\n

The court referenced those dissents by now-Chair Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Melissa Holyoak, both Republicans, in its opinion. Holyoak had questioned the \u201crace to cross the finish line,\u201d among the Democratic majority that voted for the rule at the time, and called it \u201ca missed opportunity to make useful amendments to the preexisting negative option rule within the scope of the Commission\u2019s authority.\u201d <\/p>\n

Given that the Democrats who ushered the rule across the finish line are no longer at the agency<\/a>, which currently consists of three Republican members including Ferguson and Holyoak, the future of the rule looks bleak. FTC spokesperson Juliana Gruenwald Henderson declined to comment on the ruling.<\/p>\n

Disclosure<\/strong>: Comcast \u2014 represented by NCTA – The Internet and Television Association, one of the parties to the case \u2014 is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge\u2019s parent company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal appeals court just threw out a new government regulation that would have required subscription services to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":51609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,50,153,80,3229,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-51608","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-policy","11":"tag-politics","12":"tag-regulation","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114823763991874227","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}