The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced earlierNew regulations, requiring businesses to provide consumers with a way to cancel their subscriptions, which must be as simple as when paying for a subscription and cannot affect consumers' cancellations in any way.
Many online services are quite easy to subscribe to, but when deciding to cancel, there are many complicated operations, or you have to find the correct option in a large number of pages to complete the cancellation. In response to this, the Federal Trade Commission has proposed new regulations stating that in the future, businesses must provide a cancellation method that is as easy as the paid subscription method.
Lina Khan, chairwoman of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, said that most online services currently present consumers with numerous hurdles when canceling, and they even have to navigate numerous terms of service to find the correct refund method. The new regulations are intended to improve such issues and make it easier for consumers to cancel online services they find inappropriate after using them.
According to statistics from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, thousands of complaints related to Internet service subscriptions are received every year. In 2021, an average of 42 complaints were received per day, and this year the number has increased to about 70 complaints per day, indicating that more Internet services are causing trouble when canceling subscriptions, and even deliberately making things difficult.
However, the new regulations do not prohibit businesses from offering free trials and charging after the trial period. The main regulations stipulate that businesses must clearly explain the terms and key issues of the service before charging consumers, and must also obtain the user's explicit consent in advance before charging. In addition, they must provide a simple service cancellation process so that consumers can choose to cancel and stop being charged.
Because many Internet services previously used complex cancellation systems, or even hid unfair terms or regulations in their terms of use, many consumers were forced to pay for Internet services that were not suitable for their personal needs. Therefore, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission proposed new regulations in the hope of further improving such problems.
