Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“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 …. 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.” (07/10/25)