When Sam Levine, Commissioner of New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), was eleven, he signed up for a service that would send him ten free CDs in the mail. “I didn’t know it then, but I had just signed up for my first subscription,” Levine said. A few months and a pile of bills later, he was begging his parents to help him cancel the membership he’d unknowingly purchased.

It’s been 28 years since Levine was lured in with the promise of a Cher CD, but the problem of “subscription traps”—subscriptions which are easy to get, but a minefield to cancel—has only gotten worse. At a press conference Friday, Levine joined New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former FTC Commissioner Lina Khan to present a municipal-level solution: New York City’s Click To Cancel Rule.

“These are now part of the business model for some of the largest companies in our economy.”

The idea behind the regulation is simple. A subscription should be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up for. A person should not be required to cancel a gym membership in-person if they got that membership online, or mail in a letter, or spend hours on hold with customer service in order to stop being charged for a service they aren’t using.........

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