New York City residents who are struggling to escape recurring subscription fees can now file a complaint with the city government. As of Thursday, the city’s click-to-cancel rule went into effect, requiring companies to make canceling a subscription as easy as signing up. This means that a gym that lets you join online, for example, can’t force you to call or go in person to cancel your membership.
It is the first municipality to see the rule take effect, after an appeals court struck down a federal version on procedural grounds. The city hopes this will save New Yorkers between $21.5 million and $162.5 million annually. And for Samuel Levine, commissioner of the New York Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), it’s an example of how state and local governments can hold businesses accountable when federal efforts fail. “No one should need 45 minutes of hold music to stop paying for something they never wanted,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a statement. “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 don’t let you cancel, the City is coming for them.”
Levine was the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection chief under Lina Khan, and he tried to usher in the click-to-cancel rule nationally. He says the experience of implementing the rule in New York has been “day and night.”
“We proposed this rule this year. We finalized it this year. It goes into effect this year. That’s how quickly the government should take it,” Levine said. The edge in an exclusive interview. While Levine says he’s proud of his work on the FTC rule and considers it a “model” for other state and local governments, “ultimately it took more than four years.” And then after all that, it never really gave Americans the relief they needed.” While the FTC, led by current Chairman Andrew Ferguson, has taken a first step toward possibly reinstating a similar rule, Levine is betting that more municipalities will do so first. While this leaves fewer Americans protected, it still deters companies from engaging in deceptive subscription practices.
“It’s the speed of government, as it should be”
In New York, consumers can use a new portal to file complaints if they believe a company gave them unclear subscription terms, delayed cancellation or failed to inform them that the subscription would automatically renew. After filing a complaint, DCWP will review it and may request more information and attempt to recover money from consumers and help them cancel affected subscriptions. If the agency sees a pattern of noncompliance at a given company, it could trigger further investigation and legal action. Under this rule, businesses could face fines starting at $525 per violation.
The Mayor’s Public Interest Technology (PIT) team built the portal in 10 weeks; Levine assures consumers that the experience will be very different from the White House’s new America.gov site, which he says appears to be “just an AI chatbot layered on top of the federal government’s existing infrastructure.” When consumers file a complaint on the Click-to-Cancel portal, Levine says, “they won’t be diverted into a chatbot doom loop. We’ll have real people whose full-time job it will be to help them.”
He also says it won’t be like going to a DMV office to renew your driver’s license. “If we want to restore people’s trust in government and its ability to act, we have to show that government can create great products. We have to show that not every experiment goes to the DMV. And I mean, no offense to our colleagues at the DMV,” Levine said. “People have very bad ideas about interacting with the government, and that sometimes deters them from filing complaints. You can have the best laws in the world, but at the end of the day, if your eyes and ears, the people you’re working to protect, don’t want to actually deal with the government and tell us what happened, those laws aren’t going to be effective.”
Updated October 1: Added a statement from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
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