New Proposed FTC Regulation Wants To Make It Easier For Customers To Break Up With Companies

The FTC is on the rise again and this time around, it’s trying to come up with a new proposition that would add simplicity to the lives of so many people.

The FTC is setting out a new regulation that would make it easier for users to break up with their respective companies. And by that, we mean exiting a subscription or a membership with ease, similar to how you entered into it.

This new rule is called ‘Click to Cancel’ and it was only put forward today, and it's being dubbed as the solution to all of those dark and deceptive marketing strategies. So you can bid farewell to dark client experiences as the aim is to prevent users from paying for something that they no longer feel serves them any interest or benefit.

This was further elaborated upon by the FTC as it mentioned how three main requirements would be needed to be fulfilled before users could proceed. For starters, canceling would be as simple as joining. So if you can join online then you can also bid it farewell online.

Secondly, before any organization can give out retention offers to make a user stay, it needs to request the user if they’d like to know more about them. And if the answer is no, the seller needs to accept that.

Negative-option ordeals for so many digital goods where subscriptions get renewed on an automated means are necessary until and unless the client cancels. And who better to be aware of this than Gen X users that know about this from the older days.

Lastly, they would need to have so many subscribers add yearly reminders of the situation before allowing for an auto-renewal process.

This new notice is setting out some estimates about firms that are going to be affected by this regulation would need to spend around an hour yearly for the sake of keeping a track of records and even more time regarding disclosure for statements, with added labor costs to pull this off.

This issue was supposed to be tackled in the year 2021 and that’s when it was proposed by the Senate through a new Unsubscribe Act but it just could not pull through and it failed to meet the requirements for a pass. But today, it’s being dubbed as the right step in a positive direction.

The goal here seems to be for more transparency and greater protection.

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by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World