The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals just did scuzzy businesses a solid by throwing out the click-to-cancel rule. Finalized during the Biden administration, back when the Federal Trade Commission was actually doing its job, the rule would have required companies to make canceling their services as easy as signing up. 

This rule was a slam dunk, because literally no consumer is clamoring for the right to drive to the gym to cancel your free trial or to sit on the phone with a newspaper hell-bent on keeping you trapped in a subscription. But companies desperately want that, so they ran to a friendly court to whine about how unfair it was to rob them of the ability to drain consumer pocketbooks. 

Going to the 8th Circuit was a pretty safe bet, as the court has only one Democratic appointee. Otherwise, it’s wall-to-wall Republicans eager to lend a helping hand to businesses. Five days before the rule was supposed to go into effect, the 8th Circuit obligingly blocked the rule, providing American consumers with the god-given freedom to have unwanted subscription charges hammer their bank accounts. 

One of the bases for the ruling was that the FTC failed to do a preliminary regulatory analysis, required when a rule’s impact on the economy would exceed $100 million. Of course, the only way companies can complain that making it easier to cancel things would cost at least nine figures is to acknowledge that trapping people into paying for services they can’t cancel is a significant moneymaker.

The Trump administration could always choose to restart the rulemaking process and do the necessary regulatory analysis, but these days, the FTC is not really all that jazzed about consumer protection. Instead, the agency is currently busy investigating Elon Musk’s enemies and making merger approvals contingent on companies agreeing to let the administration dictate what advertisers they choose to work with and what platforms they will advertise on. What company doesn’t love the idea of being forced to buy ads on Trump’s social media network or to have their ads appear alongside Grok’s open praise for Adolf Hitler over on X?

Though the FTC did go to court to defend the rule, the Trump administration had already tipped its hand in mid-May when it delayed the implementation of the click-to-cancel rule for two months, which just happened to be long enough for the appeals court to issue its ruling. The word salad justification for the delay was “Having conducted a fresh assessment of the burdens that forcing compliance by this date would impose, the Commission has determined that the original deferral period insufficiently accounted for the complexity of compliance”—which sounds like giving businesses a pass because they said it’s just too darn hard for them to obey. 

Since Trump illegally fired the Democratic FTC appointees months ago, there’s no real worry that any commissioners would come forward to say that maybe it is good to protect consumers from sleazy corporate tactics. So now, you can continue racking up unwanted fees with dirtbag companies whose business plan relies on keeping you trapped. Freedom!