Center Welcomes FTC's Auto-Renewal Rule

October 17, 2024

The Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice applauds the Federal Trade Commission for finalizing its landmark "Click to Cancel" rule. The final regulation will rein in predatory and deceptive marketing tactics by businesses that invite customers to enroll easily in subscription services that auto-renew and are nearly impossible to cancel. The FTC's rule, which applies across a wide range of industries, requires subscriptions to be as easy to cancel as they are to enroll in. 

In finalizing the Rule, the Commission relied heavily on a comment that the Center submitted last year. (See pages 25, 26, 77, 98, and 111, for example.) The Center’s comment emphasized the importance of a robust rule that would effectively address deceptive practices, particularly manipulative “dark patterns” that marketers often use to confuse customers and hook them into enrolling in subscriptions that they may not actually want. Our comment also included a detailed appendix that gathered dozens of examples of problematic subscription practices, in industries from automotive to apparel. Five Berkeley Law students Dylan Solomon ’25, Kavya Dasari ’23, Adam Pukier ’24, Eva Thomas ’25, and Bennett Williams ’25 worked with Center staff to prepare the comment. Ted Mermin and David Nahmias also weighed in on the proposed rule in the American Prospectand The Hollywood Reporter

The Commission also relied on comments filed by Center Faculty Advisor Prof. Chris Hoofnagle and by a group of law professors, led by Professors Kaitlin Caruso and Vijay Raghavan, with whom the Center has worked on the issue for the past several years. Given that over 16,000 comments were submitted in the rulemaking, we are pleased that our work, and that of our colleagues, seems to have had a tangible impact on the Commission’s process. 

The final Rule is not the only exciting development in the effort to prevent onerous and abusive subscription practices. Earlier this month, the California Legislature passed – and Governor Gavin Newsom signed – Assembly Bill 2863, which largely mirrors the FTC’s approach and focuses on the same goal: that subscriptions should be as easy to exit as they are to enter. The Center’s sister organization, the California Low-Income Consumer Coalition, supported AB 2863. 

As the FTC stated in the preamble to the final Rule – quoting directly from our comment – “‘requiring the mechanism of cancellation be as simple as enrollment’ will minimize ‘overly complex cancellation processes with multiple steps,’ and prevent sellers ‘from trapping consumers in automatically renewing subscriptions through obstacles created by tedious processes or confusion.’” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.