Click to Cancel Died. Your Cancellation Rights Didn't.

Vacated Six Days Before It Mattered

The FTC's Negative Option Rule, which everyone called Click to Cancel, was going to require that cancelling a subscription be as easy as signing up for one. Same channel, same number of steps, no retention gauntlet.

On July 8, 2025, the Eighth Circuit vacated it. In full. The compliance date was July 14. Companies that had spent a year rebuilding their cancellation flows woke up to find the requirement had evaporated with under a week to spare.

Here is what did not happen. A court did not rule that companies may trap you in a subscription. The rule died on procedure, and the distinction is the entire point.

It Lost on Paperwork

The FTC has rulemaking authority under Magnuson-Moss, and that authority comes with steps. One of them, Section 22, requires a preliminary regulatory analysis when a proposed rule will impose more than $100 million in annual compliance costs on the economy.

The FTC initially estimated the cost fell below that threshold. An administrative law judge later found it did not. At that point the Commission was required to go back and produce the analysis. It proceeded to a final rule instead.

The Eighth Circuit held that skipping the step was not harmless and vacated the whole rule rather than remanding it for repair. No finding that the substance was wrong. No holding about what companies owe consumers. The agency took a shortcut and the shortcut cost it the rule.

Say a company reads that headline and concludes cancellation obligations are gone. That company is about to have a bad year, because the rule was never the primary source of the obligation.

The Statute Underneath

ROSCA is the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act. Congress passed it in 2010, no court has touched it, and it does most of the work people credited to Click to Cancel.

ROSCA requires that before charging you on a recurring basis, a seller clearly disclose all material terms, obtain your express informed consent, and provide simple mechanisms to stop recurring charges. That last phrase is statutory text. Simple mechanisms. A cancellation process engineered to exhaust you is not a simple mechanism, and the FTC has been winning ROSCA cases on exactly that theory for years.

Section 5 of the FTC Act sits behind ROSCA and reaches further. Unfair or deceptive acts or practices. A signup that takes two clicks and a cancellation that requires a phone call during business hours, three retention offers, and a mailed written notice is a practice a court can find unfair without any rule specifically prohibiting it.

So the enforcement architecture survived intact. What was lost was the bright line. Under the vacated rule a company either matched the signup channel or it didn't. Now the question is whether a given cancellation flow is simple, which is a fight rather than a checkbox, and fights are slower and more expensive than checkboxes.

Your State Probably Did Not Wait

Federal law is not the only law, and this is the part that gets overlooked because the federal story is louder.

California's automatic renewal statute is the aggressive one, and it applies to any company charging a California resident regardless of where the company sits. It requires that a consumer who signed up online be able to cancel online, without talking to anyone. New York, Illinois, Colorado, and a growing list of others have their own versions.

These statutes are frequently drafted with private rights of action attached, which is the part that concentrates a company's attention. A federal rule is enforced when a federal agency chooses to enforce it. A state statute with a private right of action is enforced whenever a plaintiff's lawyer notices, and plaintiffs' lawyers noticed this category a while ago.

The practical upshot is that a national company generally cannot maintain two cancellation flows, one for California and one for everyone else. Building to the strictest state is cheaper than segmenting. So the California rule tends to become the default rule, and you may be receiving its benefit without living there.

What Is Coming Back

The FTC restarted. On January 30, 2026, it sent a draft advance notice of proposed rulemaking to OIRA, formally reopening the process. Comments closed on April 13.

An ANPRM is the earliest stage of rulemaking, which tells you something about the timeline. This is not a rule that gets fixed and reissued in a quarter. The agency is starting from the beginning, presumably with the regulatory analysis it skipped the first time, and the scope of whatever emerges is genuinely open. It could be narrower than the vacated rule. It could be broader.

In the meantime, ROSCA enforcement continued without interruption, and companies that dismantled their improved cancellation flows in July 2025 made a bet on the wrong document.

Build the Record Before You Need It

Now the useful part, which is what to do the day the charge you cancelled shows up again.

Cancel in writing whenever a written channel exists. Email, support ticket, chat transcript, in-app confirmation. A phone cancellation with no confirmation number is a conversation you cannot prove happened, and the company's records will not volunteer to remember it. If the phone is the only channel, get the representative's name and a confirmation number, then send an email the same day stating that you cancelled by phone at a given time and requesting written confirmation. Their silence in response to that email is worth something later.

Screenshot the cancellation confirmation screen. Not the email. The screen. Confirmation emails get spam-filtered and then it becomes your word about an email you cannot produce.

If a charge appears after a documented cancellation, dispute it with your card issuer and attach the documentation. This is a chargeback with evidence, which is a different proceeding from a chargeback where you assert you cancelled. The issuer resolves the first one quickly. Do not lead with a call to the merchant, because the retention department is measured on saves and will offer you two months free instead of a refund.

And check the terms for an arbitration clause before you assume litigation is available, because most subscription agreements have one and the window to opt out closes fast. That clause decides where any of this gets argued, and it was drafted by people who thought about it more recently than you did.