Media group sues FTC for making canceling subscriptions less of a pain in the ass

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission instituted a new rule centered on one of the major problems of the general human condition in 2024, i.e., the whole thing of it being a massive pain in the ass to unsubscribe from basically anything. (Do you need us to go into extensive detail on this? You have a phone, and exist in the world. You’ve been forced to navigate a call tree, or God help us, an automated chat agent, just to stop paying $10 a month for a service you haven’t used in years because you signed up for a “free trial” to watch four episodes of a TV show in 2019 and then immediately forgot about it. You know.) Shorthanded as the “click to cancel” rule, the ruling says that consumers have to give explicit consent before they sign up for “subscriptions, auto-renewals, and free trials that convert to paid memberships”; it also requires canceling a subscription to be at least as easy as signing up was in the first place.

Given that this is the first government policy we’ve seen in like a decade where we immediately found ourselves nodding our heads in agreement and whispering “Kick ass,” the rule has, of course, faced major resistance. (The FTC itself only passed it by a 3-2 vote, with two Republican members opposing the ruling.) Now it’s the subject of a lawsuit from the Internet & Television Association (abbreviated NCTA, because it used to have cable, not internet, in the name) an industry group that represents both the country’s biggest cable providers, and some of its major media companies. Comcast, obviously, is on the list of groups it represents (since it falls into both camps), but so are Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and providers like Charter Communications and Cox Communications. All of whom, presumably, are in support of the NCTA’s decision to sue the FTC this week for what it’s calling government overreach by infringing their god-given right to make you sit through a time-wasting exit interview every time you want to stop paying for cable.

News of the lawsuit was reported by Reuters, which notes that it’s been very precisely aimed at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which is apparently the go-to court for businesses suing government regulators because it’s majority Republican appointees on the bench. Meanwhile, we’re just going to stare at the following sentences from USA Today‘s write-up of the lawsuit until our blood pressure spikes so hard that it feels like we’re high: “Trade groups representing advertisers, news publishers, retailers and other industries argue that a multistep cancellation process protects consumers or lets them take advantage of a better deal. They say the new FTC rule places too many burdens on businesses and is unnecessary.”

Yeah, that’s the good stuff.