A Welcome Development

The Federal Trade Commission has announced that aggressively take actions against deceptive subscription retention tactics used by many in media, such as "Click to subscribe, call to cancel."

This is long overdue.  If you can subscribe online, you should be able to UNsubscribe online, and the FTC should have been addressing this when America Online was blanketing the United States with "Free" CDs in the 1990s:

Discovering they had to get on the phone to cancel a subscription they signed up for online rankled several respondents in our survey looking at why people canceled their news subscriptions. The reaction to the call-to-cancel policy ranged from “an annoyance” and “ridiculous” to “shady” and “oppressive.”

Publishers tend to think of this as “retention.” A study of 526 news organizations in the United States found that only 41% make it easy for people to cancel subscriptions online, and more than half trained customer service reps in tactics to dissuade customers who call to unsubscribe.

The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, recently made it clear that it sees the practice as 1) one of several “dark patterns that trick or trap consumers into subscriptions” and 2) straight-up illegal. The FTC vowed to ramp up enforcement on companies that fail to provide an “easy and simple” cancellation process, including an option that’s “at least as easy” as the one to subscribe.

………

Scroll hrough those picking up on the FTC announcement and you’ll see a few repeat offenders — cancelling a Planet Fitness membership appears to be a Sisyphean task — and news organizations are among the ones catching the most flak.

This is one of the banes of modern life, and it's nice that the FTC is going after this.

Still, I think that we need to start frog-marching executives out of their offices in handcuffs as a proper deterrent.

I know what you are thinking, "Having cops arrest people for infractions whose only penalty is a fine is unconstitutional," but you are wrong.  In Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, decided in 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that cops can arrest anyone for any offense without a warrant, no matter how small.