Photo Credit: NYC.gov

New York City enacts a click-to-cancel rule requiring businesses to enable single-click subscription cancellations after a federal version was struck down.

On Thursday, October 1, New York City became the first municipality to enact a “click-to-cancel” rule requiring businesses to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up. The move follows appeals that struck down a federal version last year. The city expects that this new rule will save New Yorkers between $21.5 million and $162.5 million annually.

“No one should need 45 minutes of hold music to stop paying for something they never wanted,” said NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “If a company can take your money with one click, you should be able to get your money back with one click. And now, if they won’t let you cancel, the City is coming for them.”

Samuel Levine, Commissioner of the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), told The Verge that the rule is an example of how state and local governments can hold companies accountable when the federal government can’t or won’t. Levine was the first Federal Trade Commission (FTC) consumer protection chief to try and introduce the click-to-cancel rule on a national scale, but implementing the rule in New York City was a far less painful endeavor.

“We proposed this rule this year. We finalized it this year. It’s taking effect this year. This is the speed of government as it should be,” Levine said, calling the NYC rule a model for other state and local governments.

He added that he is proud of his work on the FTC rule, but the process to get it to the finish line—where it was ultimately struck down—was an uphill battle.

“At the end of the day, it took more than four years. And then after all of that, it never actually gave Americans the relief they needed,” said Levine.

Levine added that while the FTC under current chair Andrew Ferguson has taken steps toward a potentially re-established rule on a federal level, he suspects that more local governments will get there first.

New Yorkers can file complaints on a newly launched government site if they believe a business delayed cancellations, gave them unclear subscription terms, or failed to inform them the subscription would auto-renew. The DCWP will review complaints and may reach out for additional information and help them cancel subscriptions as needed. Should the agency see a pattern of noncompliance at a particular business, it could lead to further investigation and legal action. Businesses could be hit with fines starting at $525 per violation.

Levine also assures the public that the site, which was launched by the mayor’s Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew within 10 weeks, will not direct users “into a chatbot doom loop.” This will make it a far different experience from the White House’s new America.gov site, which Levine criticizes as “just an AI chatbot layered on top of the federal government’s existing infrastructure.”

“We’re going to have actual people whose full-time job is to help them.”