"If you can sign up with one click, you can cancel with one click."

That was New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last Friday, announcing a Click-to-Cancel rule that kicks in on October 1. It sounds like common sense. It is not. It is a direct attack on a business model that the entire consumer internet has quietly standardised, and the fact that it required a mayor, an executive order and a $525-per-violation penalty to state the obvious tells you exactly how far things have drifted.

The rule, and why it exists

The rule is simple. If you subscribed online, you must be able to leave online. No phone tree, no retention agent, no "please email our billing team within 30 days of your renewal date." It applies to automatic renewal and continuous service subscriptions, forces companies to spell out their terms upfront, and is enforced by the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. It is paired with a proposed junk fees rule that would require the advertised price to be the actual price. The city estimates the cancellation rule alone puts up to $162.5 million a year back in New Yorkers' pockets.

This is a revival, not an invention. The Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan wrote a national click-to-cancel rule. The Eighth Circuit killed it in July 2025 on a procedural technicality, not because the underlying problem stopped existing. Khan is now a Mamdani transition co-chair and stood next to him at the press conference. The federal door closed, so the city walked through a window.

Adobe is the tell

The clearest evidence that this is a design choice and not an accident is Adobe.

The FTC went after Adobe over its annual-paid-monthly plan, the one where the early termination fee is buried behind a hyperlink and only really announces itself when you try to leave. Adobe settled for $150 million. Amazon settled its own Prime enrolment-and-cancellation case for $2.5 billion.

Sit with those numbers. Two of the most sophisticated software companies on earth, with some of the best UX teams money can hire, somehow produced cancellation flows that regulators found deceptive. These are companies that can make a one-tap checkout work flawlessly across 190 countries. The idea that they simply could not figure out a cancel button is insulting. Friction was the feature. Every extra screen is a percentage of users who give up, and at subscription scale, a percentage is a revenue line.

I tried to cancel Netflix this morning

So I ran the test myself. I opened Netflix, went in to cancel, and timed it.

The button is not on the home screen. It is not in the profile drawer. It is inside Account, several taps deep, past everything the app would rather you look at. When you finally reach it, Netflix does not cancel. Netflix negotiates. Would you like to pause your membership instead? Would you like to switch to a cheaper plan? Are you sure, because you will lose your watch history and your recommendations. Then, and only then, a confirmation.

None of this is illegal. None of it is even unusual. That is the point. Signing up took me one screen and one saved card. Leaving took me a menu hunt, two counter-offers and a guilt trip. Nobody at Netflix wrote a memo saying "make cancellation painful." They just ran the experiments, and the painful version won.

Multiply that by the eleven subscriptions the average urban Indian household is now carrying across streaming, music, cloud storage, food delivery memberships, fitness apps and the AI tools that have suddenly appeared on everyone's card statement. The tax is not any single ₹199. It is the accumulated inertia.

The auto-renew trap has an Indian accent

This conversation becomes even more relevant in India because, at least on paper, our regulations are already ahead of many global markets. The RBI's e-mandate framework fundamentally changed recurring payments by requiring customer authentication, pre-debit notifications and giving users the ability to revoke mandates through their banks. The rollout disrupted subscription businesses when it was introduced, but it also made silent recurring payments much harder than in several other countries. The Central Consumer Protection Authority later introduced guidelines against dark patterns, specifically identifying subscription traps, forced action and drip pricing as unfair practices.

The problem is that while the regulations exist, the experience inside many apps has changed very little. It is still common to see free trials that automatically convert into paid subscriptions, annual plans selected by default, auto-renewal quietly enabled during checkout and cancellation options buried deep inside account settings. Most of these experiences technically comply with existing regulations, but they continue to rely on user inertia rather than genuine choice.

The real lesson

That is why New York's approach is worth paying attention to. It does not attempt to regulate subscription pricing or interfere with business models. Instead, it focuses on the one part that matters most to consumers: the ability to leave. India has already addressed recurring payments through the banking system, but the next logical step is ensuring that users can cancel directly within the apps and services they subscribed to. The moment cancellation becomes genuinely as easy as signing up, companies have to compete on the quality of their products rather than the effectiveness of their retention funnels. That is probably how subscriptions were always supposed to work.