FTC Proposes Rule Provision Making It Easier for Consumers to “Click to Cancel”

>No more manipulative designs that trick consumers into paying for services.

The article calls it "manipulative designs", that's a pretty vague definition to me. I wonder if the result will be malicious compliance by businesses. Similar to the cookie banners appearing on websites in the EU to comply to GDPR, that make it easier (i.e. less clicks) to accept all cookies than to reject them.

I heard about this on the radio this morning. It struck me as an example of the "death by 1000 cuts" of mildly burdensome regulations that each make it just a bit harder to run a company. I guess companies wouldn't have to worry about it until they have gotten big enough to have an unsubscribe webpage, so maybe not so burdensome.

While we're at it, can we please mandate some sort of notification for recurring billing?

I once interviewed at a company where they said that they had something like 30% dormant accounts still paying for the service. I asked how they were manage to pull this off. They said that if they hadn't had any activity 28 days they didn't send email reminders that they were being billed. I ended the call shortly thereafter.

Ever since, I've always been mindful about how frequently I'm not notified I paid for something by a company, but instead from my cardholder's app.

Companies would only need to implement an unsubscribe webpage if they also had a web page where customers could subscribe. That doesn't seem like an overly burdensome requirement to me.