You all know how it works, right? It doesn’t matter whether it is your gym membership, a wine club, or a streaming service. Signing up is easy and instant. A couple of clicks, some personal details, and a credit card later and you are all on board.
Want to cancel, though, and suddenly you are like Jack Burton and Wang Chi descending through levels of hell to confront the final boss to secure freedom from the contract.
The membership cancellation options are hidden, layers down in the functionality. Frequently they are not automated, and all your button pushing simply triggers a manual process in the background that the provider then drags their feet over. Meanwhile, another debit has been made, and they have another month’s worth of cash from you.
Well, not anymore you Capitalist Pig-Dogs!
A new rule from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has been labeled as the “click to cancel” rule. It will come into force in six months. So what does it do?
Quite simply, it requires membership organizations and subscription providers to make it as easy to cancel subscriptions and memberships as it was to sign up for them in the first place.
There’s more. It also means that consent is to be required at the time of conversion for a subscription to be switched from a free trial to something that auto-renews. If sign-up is fully automated then it will also be illegal to force customers to talk to an agent or a chatbot to cancel the subscription.
The general guideline states that getting out of these things must involve a process or functionality “at least as easy to use” as the one they used to snare you in the first place. This applies to all businesses, not just streamers and streaming.
Not everyone is happy. The Motion Picture Association and the Entertainment Software Association have declared parts of the ruling “unworkable in many respects”.