The FTC's Click-To-Cancel Rule Changes Everything For Streaming Services Like Netflix

Good news, folks: It's about to get a lot easier for us to say goodbye to any unwanted streaming services. As it stands, disgruntled users have all sorts of reasons to want to cut the cord (so to speak) from their digital overlords. Maybe the latest season of your favorite show finished airing and won't be back for another patience-testing two years. More likely, Netflix canceled a promising new series altogether before it even had a chance to establish its audience (like the well-received series "Kaos," as recently reported by Variety) and continues to give prospective viewers serious trust issues. And, of course, there's always a tendency among all the usual suspects to hike their prices yet again and make the expense no longer worthwhile. Whatever the case may be, the federal government is finally stepping in to make a long-overdue change that will benefit customers everywhere.

In a headline-making move earlier today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that streaming services will no longer be able to get away with complicated and — let's face it — frankly shady methods meant to discourage subscribers from canceling their recurring memberships. Informally known as a "click-to-cancel" rule, this act will force streamers to "make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up," according to the press release. The provision passed in a tight vote of 3-2 and will go into effect 180 days following its publishing in the Federal Register. (You're not going to believe this, but the two dissents came from Republicans, according to Reuters. In fact, this is a big win for the Biden/Harris Administration, which previously vowed to take on this underhanded practice.) FTC Chair Lina M. Khan said in a statement:

"Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription. The FTC's rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want."

As much as the Netflixes and Maxes and Prime Videos of the world are constantly chasing viewership numbers defined by vague-sounding metrics like "minutes watched," the dirty little secret of this current streaming era is that every service simply wants as much of the general population as possible to be subscribed to its platform. While CEOs would obviously rather have shows like "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" earn high enough ratings to justify the enormous budget expenses involved, the not-insignificant amount of customers who are passively paying for year-long Prime Video subscriptions without ever even watching anything on it is a net win, too. Soon, however, even your technology-unsavvy parents juggling way too many paid subscriptions will be able to cancel with just a single click of the television remote.

That will be a marked improvement of the current status quo. In just one example, my attempt to cancel an ongoing Max subscription was met with a prompt asking, "Before you go, Jeremy, can we do anything to help?" This is followed by a (somewhat desperate-looking) plea to opt for a more cheaper subscription tier, after which the algorithm doesn't even pretend to help anymore and instead offers up a "Can't find anything to watch? Explore our recently added movies and series" tab to random movies and shows. Once you finally make it past these riddles three, you can navigate to one of two buttons: "Back to Subscription" or "Continue to Cancel." Even that isn't the end of it, though! There's another page hawking one last "special offer" in the hopes of getting me to stick around (which, full disclosure, I'm probably going to take as soon as this article publishes), before finally allowing me to do what I came here to do in the first place. Exhausting.

Streaming has serious problems and no easy answers to fix them, but even this one relatively tiny step for corporate transparency and ethics is a giant leap for customers like you and me.