You'll now have a much harder time canceling a gym membership
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals just did scuzzy businesses a solid by throwing out the click-to-cancel rule. Finalized during the Biden administration, back when the Federal Trade Commission was actually doing its job, the rule would have required companies to make canceling their services as easy as signing up.
This rule was a slam dunk, because literally no consumer is clamoring for the right to drive to the gym to cancel your free trial or to sit on the phone with a newspaper hell-bent on keeping you trapped in a subscription. But companies desperately want that, so they ran to a friendly court to whine about how unfair it was to rob them of the ability to drain consumer pocketbooks.
Going to the 8th Circuit was a pretty safe bet, as the court has only one Democratic appointee. Otherwise, it’s wall-to-wall Republicans eager to lend a helping hand to businesses. Five days before the rule was supposed to go into effect, the 8th Circuit obligingly blocked the rule, providing American consumers with the god-given freedom to have unwanted subscription charges hammer their bank accounts.
One of the bases for the ruling was that the FTC failed to do a preliminary regulatory analysis, required when a rule’s impact on the economy would exceed $100 million. Of course, the only way companies can complain that making it easier to cancel things would cost at least nine figures is to acknowledge that trapping people into paying for services they can’t cancel is a significant moneymaker.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/9/2332529/-You-ll-now-have-a-much-harder-time-cancelling-a-gym-membership
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