- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Full title: NYC is now the first city in America that bans sketchy subscriptions / As of Thursday, the city’s click-to-cancel rule has taken effect, which requires businesses to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up.
Just a friendly reminder that your city could be doing any of this right now as well.

This was a federal rule, one guess who undid it.
And Lina Khan is in NYC now!
It’s pretty crazy that the most no-duh common-sense policies solely exist under the banner of “radical communism.” Almost makes one question the political compass.
“radical communism” 🙄
the GOP and even a lot of people on “the left” in the US couldn’t give you half the description of what communism is. this regulation falls squarely under classical Liberalism, and despite their squawking about Libertarianism or whatever Republicans act more like Liberals than their ideology poisoned brains could comprehend.
Exactly. This type of thing is such obvious low hanging fruit quick win for any government.
So set my VPN to NYC, got it
A lot of them probably will require proof of address like a lot with the California laws.
And it’ll only take one NYC resident to challenge that before the requirement is outlawed. If it doesn’t require proof of address to sign up, it shouldn’t require proof of address to cancel.
This is refreshing. I’m so tired of right wing people being like “the government can’t do anything right and I’m going to prove it by sabotaging and starving the government”.
Imagine what we could have if we ran the government to help people.
Gyms would go bankrupt
California has something similar enough: https://www.engadget.com/general/californias-click-to-cancel-subscription-bill-is-signed-into-law-123058770.html.
Big Kwame does it again
Are they going to try to force compliance on companies outside of NY? Even if they could, will we sites just block NY IP addresses? How does this work?
If similar to equivalent state regs, when access to customers residing in that market is gated by compliance and subject to lawsuits or ban, the first phase of business-side operations change is immediately setting up minimum compliance workflow like a special webpage coupled with countermeasures (like proof of residency; IP historically difficult in court but has been used successfully for state-specific age gating) and boundary testing cycles. With especially large markets, however, the overhead associated with maintaining multiple separate workflows fails the efficiency test and the workflows are merged, which is how everyone tends to benefit from pro-consumer laws like GDPR.
Good luck getting planet fitness to allow this.
Planet fitness doesn’t have fuck you money to defend this in a lawsuit. They’ll comply to avoid being sued into irrelevance.









