Business
FTC adopts 'click to cancel' rule to make it easier to end subscriptions, mirroring California law
The Federal Trade Commission continued its crackdown on businesses that deceptively market and sell subscription services, adopting a rule Wednesday requiring companies to let consumers cancel a gym membership, streaming video service or other subscription as easily as they started it.
The rule expands the FTC’s restrictions on “negative option” offers, which automatically start, renew or expand a service unless a consumer takes action to stop it. Examples include free trials that convert automatically to paid subscriptions and one-year contracts that renew endlessly on their own.
Long in the works — the commission began looking into the issue in 2019 — the FTC’s rule is similar to a California “click to cancel” measure that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law last month. The main requirement is that subscription services allow people to cancel as simply as they signed up — for example, though an easy-to-find link online or a single phone call.
The rule also requires businesses to obtain explicit consent before signing someone up for a subscription, bars them from withholding important information or lying about the services they’re selling, and requires them to “clearly and conspicuously” disclose the terms before collecting a customer’s payment information.
As more companies and product lines have shifted from one-time payments to recurring monthly fees, more consumers have bemoaned the hurdles they have to clear to extricate themselves from the subscriptions they no longer want. The FTC said it had received nearly 70 complaints a day on average from consumers about recurring subscriptions and negative options this year, up from 42 a day in 2021.
In an email, Lindsay Owens of the Groundwork Collaborative, an advocacy group that supports the new rule, said examples of the problems included “sitting on hold to try to cancel a subscription that you signed up for online in seconds, having to drive to the gym to cancel a subscription when you can access every other part of your account from the website, [and] having to navigate a slew of unwanted and often misleading ‘deals’ designed to keep you enrolled.”
She added, “The digital economy has made purchasing, signing up, and enrolling a breeze. Now the FTC has made a rule that consumers must be able to cancel a subscription just as seamlessly as they can enroll, without the tricks, traps, extra time and roadblocks companies have deployed deceptively for years to keep people on autopay.”
In a statement, Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director at Public Interest Research Group, likened many subscription services and memberships to “a visit to Hotel California: ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.’” Now, she said, “You’ll be able to leave.”
Many consumers also complained about trying to cancel a service only to encounter “a never-ending phone tree or online maze that required click after click after click, only to find themselves back at the beginning.” The FTC’s new restrictions and requirements, she said, “give consumers more freedom to switch providers, read a different news service, buy a different pet food or none at all.”
The rule split the commission along partisan lines, with the three Democratic appointees in favor and two Republicans opposed. In her dissenting statement, Commissioner Melissa Holyoak said the rule not only exceeded the agency’s legal authority but also “incentivizes companies to avoid negative option features that honest businesses and consumers find valuable.” Predicting that the rule would not survive a legal challenge, she accused the commission’s chair, Lina Khan, of rushing to finalize the rule before the election to help the Democratic candidate for president, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Unless a court intervenes, the new rule will go into effect in about six months. The new state law (Assembly Bill 2863) will kick in a few months later, applying to subscription contracts signed or renewed after July 1, 2025.
Robert Herrell of the Consumer Federation of California, which sponsored the state law, welcomed the FTC rule but noted that AB 2863 goes further. In particular, he said in an email, it includes two requirements the FTC originally proposed but dropped from the final rule: that consumers receive a reminder before a subscription automatically renews each year, and that subscribers can cancel without having to wade through multiple discount offers and other attempts to persuade them to renew.
The state law also will continue to apply to California consumers if the FTC’s new rule is enjoined by a federal judge or blocked by Congress, Herrell said.
The Na’vi won the battle of the box office this weekend, as “Avatar: Fire and Ash” hauled in a hefty $88 million in the U.S. and Canada during its opening weekend.
The third installment of the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios’ “Avatar” franchise brought in an estimated total of $345 million globally, with about $257 million of that coming from international audiences. The movie reportedly has a budget of at least $350 million.
Box office analysts had expected a big international response to the most recent film, particularly since its predecessor “Avatar: The Way of Water” had strong showings in markets like Germany, France and China.
In China, the film opened to an estimated $57.6 million, marking the second highest 2025 opening for a U.S. film in the country since Disney’s “Zootopia 2” a few weeks ago. (That film went on to gross more than $271.7 million in China on its way to a global box office total of $1.1 billion.)
The strong response in China is another sign that certain movies can still do well in the country, which was once seen as a key force multiplier for big blockbusters and animated family films but has in recent years cooled to American movies due to geopolitics and the rise of its domestic film industry.
Angel Studio’s animated biblical tale “David” came in second at the box office this weekend, with an estimated domestic gross of $22 million. Lionsgate thriller “The Housemaid,” Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Movies’ “The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants” and “Zootopia 2” rounded out the top five.
The weekend’s haul likely comes as a relief to theater owners, who have weathered a roller coaster year.
After a difficult first three months, the spring brought hits like “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners” before the summer ended mostly flat. A sleepy fall brought panic to the exhibition business until closer to the Thanksgiving holiday, when “Wicked: For Good” and “Zootopia 2” drew in audiences.
Dear Liz: When I retired, I had a small 401(k) with about $12,000 in it. Instead of rolling that money into an IRA, I took a distribution and paid taxes on it. I had no immediate need for the remaining funds, so eventually I opened a new IRA account and deposited the money.
I now realize I should have put it in a Roth IRA so I wouldn’t face double taxation on the money. This is the stupidest thing I’ve done in recent memory. Is there any legal mechanism I can use to get that money out and into a Roth without paying taxes the second time?
Answer: You made a mistake, but probably not the one you think.
You can’t contribute to an IRA — or a Roth IRA, for that matter — if you don’t have earned income. So if you’ve fully retired, you should contact your IRA administrator and let them know you need to withdraw your “excess contribution” as well as any earnings the contribution has made.
If you contributed this year, you have until your tax filing deadline — typically April 15, 2026 — to remove the funds without penalty. If you contributed in a previous year, you’ll typically face a 6% excise tax for each year the money remained in your account.
Now, a warning about financial mistakes: They tend to become more common as we age. That can be incredibly unsettling, especially to do-it-yourselfers used to handling finances competently on their own. Retirement is a good time to start implementing some guardrails to protect ourselves and our money.
Hiring a tax pro would be a good first step. Anything to do with a retirement fund should be run past this pro first to make sure you’re following the tax rules.
Dear Liz: In response to a reader who asked about creating a will, you suggested options for low-cost online resources. That is great! But, I would encourage you to remind readers to designate beneficiaries on accounts and assets where that option is available.
While they should still have a will, many readers may not know that they can add beneficiaries to brokerage, checking, and savings accounts (in addition to IRA and retirement accounts) so that their assets will pass directly to the designated beneficiaries and not have to go through probate with the extra hassle, time and expense.
For those without a trust, designating beneficiaries may be the easiest way to pass on many of their assets. In California (and some other states), even houses may pass without probate with a transfer-on-death deed. Many readers may not know about the option to add beneficiaries, and you would do your readers a service by educating them about it.
Answer: Anyone adding beneficiaries to accounts needs to be aware of some major potential drawbacks.
A big one involves settling the estate. If all available funds are transferred directly to beneficiaries, the person settling the estate may not have enough cash to do their job.
Beneficiary designations can also result in unintentionally unequal distributions if there’s more than one heir, and complications if the beneficiaries die first or aren’t changed appropriately as life circumstances change.
That’s not to say that beneficiary designations are the wrong choice, but they’re certainly not a one-size-fits-all option.
Dear Liz: Your recent column about advanced directives said that people could get a free version at PrepareForYourCare.org. I found there is a charge. Is this for all online directives?
Answer: Prepare is a free site supported by donations, grants and licensing agreements. If you were asked to pay, you either clicked the donate button or weren’t on the correct site.
Liz Weston, Certified Financial Planner, is a personal finance columnist. Questions may be sent to her at 3940 Laurel Canyon, No. 238, Studio City, CA 91604, or by using the “Contact” form at asklizweston.com.
To understand how Mr. Trump has achieved this omnipresence, The New York Times reviewed the first 329 days of his second term, finding at least one instance each day when he attracted the public’s attention to himself and his actions.
The review encompassed more than 250 media appearances, more than 320 official appearances, and more than 5,000 Truth Social posts or reposts. The analysis shows that while Mr. Trump has lagged his predecessors in his number of official appearances, he has pursued a raft of innovative methods to force himself into the public consciousness on a daily, and sometimes even hourly, basis.
The battery of activity started from the moment he was inaugurated, when he traveled from the Capitol Building to the Capital One Arena to publicly sign a flurry of executive orders.
Since then, he has stayed in the public eye in part by doing things no president has ever done. High-stakes Oval Office meetings, like his negotiations with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, are held on-camera and broadcast live on global news networks. His Q.-and-A. sessions with reporters frequently last an hour or more.
He regularly airs his opinions – on social media, in discursive asides at rallies – about idiosyncratic subjects that range widely across the zeitgeist, from Sydney Sweeney’s sexy denim ads to the redesigned logo of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain to the mysterious fate of the aviator Amelia Earhart, who vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
And his engagement with the news media has soared well beyond the start of his first administration.
Through Dec. 14, Mr. Trump took reporters’ questions on 449 occasions, compared with 223 during the same period of his first term. On average, Mr. Trump has interacted with journalists roughly twice a day, doubling his rate from 2017, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University political scientist who tracks presidential press interactions. Mr. Trump limits which news outlets can ask questions at small events, but in sheer volume, he is the most media-accessible modern president, and far outpaces his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Reporters will be in my office asking me for the president’s reaction to a breaking news story,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in an interview. “And I’ll just say to them, ‘I don’t know, why don’t you ask him yourself in 30 minutes?’”
President Trump’s media appearances have soared this year, more than doubling both the Biden administration’s and those of his own first term.
Finding the Cameras
Many of his public moments go viral online, like his diatribe about restoring the name of the Washington Redskins, or the A.I.-generated video meme he posted of himself dribbling a soccer ball with Cristiano Ronaldo in the Oval Office. They take on a life of their own, rippling across social media and dissected and amplified by influencers and mass media platforms alike.
The result is a president whose not-so-inner monologue is injected into our daily lives in myriad ways, when we are watching TV on the weekends or idly scrolling the web – a Greek chorus for our national narrative.
“He’s the most ubiquitous president ever,” said Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian.
The media strategy aligns with his political strategy.
Dating back to his years as an outspoken real estate developer and reality TV star, Mr. Trump has relished being unavoidable for comment. But at age 79, he has been outdoing his younger self. And there is a logic to his logorrhea.
Mr. Trump’s allies often speak of the political benefits of flooding the zone: pursuing so many policies, ideas, and dramatic restructurings of the normal ways of governance as to overwhelm the system. “All pedal, no brake,” as Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s one-time adviser, has called it.
“We joke internally that he is our ultimate director of communications,” Ms. Leavitt said. “He has incredible media instincts, and he is the final decision maker on all policy, and he has been in a ‘flood the zone,’ ‘do as much as possible’ mindset since he walked into the Oval Office on Jan. 20.”
All presidents benefit from the awesome news-making powers of the office, with its agenda-setting influence over a dedicated global press corps. But Mr. Trump has outstripped his predecessors in whipsawing the public’s attention onto matters small and large – and limiting the level of scrutiny that any one shocking remark or policy proposal receives.
“People can really only focus on a handful of things a day,” said Bill Burton, a deputy White House press secretary under former President Barack Obama. “This attention flood is working for Trump because he is able to do an extraordinary amount of executive actions and very little of it can get attention.”
Or as Mr. Brinkley put it: “He plays to win the day, every day, around the clock.”
His commentary takes on a life of its own.
One of Mr. Trump’s political assets is his instinct for virality.
With a natural feel for the web, Mr. Trump has a knack for amplifying wacky memes and pop culture curios that can drive days of online discourse. Sometimes, coverage of his offhand remarks or late-night social media posts can crowd out the more significant, norm-shattering changes he is making to American governance.
Late one Friday night in May, the president posted an obviously A.I.-generated image of himself as the pope. It struck a nerve.
Mr. Trump had already courted controversy days earlier, after the death of Pope Francis on April 21.
“I’d like to be pope,” the president told reporters who asked about who should become the next pontiff. “That would be my number one choice.”
The comment disturbed some Catholics, who said the notion was crude and insensitive. That reaction seemed only to prompt Mr. Trump to double down, posting the A.I.-generated image to his Truth Social account days later. By the weekend it had become a cultural phenomenon, mocked on “Saturday Night Live” and called out by experts as an example of misleading A.I. content.
After Mr. Trump posts the A.I. image …
May 2
Trump posts A.I. image of himself as Pope
There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr. President. We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.
May 3
NYS Catholic Conference says “do not mock us”
May 3
“Saturday Night Live” covers fake image
May 3 Vatican asked about image, declines to comment
May 4
Cardinal Joseph Tobin of New Jersey criticizes image as “not good”
May 4
JD Vance defends Trump on X, calling it a joke … some Catholics were outraged, prompting a news cycle focused on the controversy …
5
Says “the Catholics loved it”
… before Mr. Trump suggested he had nothing to do with it.
Mr. Trump, who is not Catholic, had plenty of defenders, too. They said his commentary and the A.I. image were simply jokes, part of the president’s unique comedic style.
“As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen,” Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, wrote on X.
In his quest for attention, the president is often aided by a cottage industry of right-wing influencers and activists who are primed to syndicate, reinforce and defend whatever content he pushes out each day. For this conservative media ecosystem, Mr. Trump’s messaging and commentary are the raw fuel that drives clicks, shares and views.
On June 7, the president’s visit to a raucous U.F.C. fight – complete with a “Trump dance” entrance into the arena – generated an immediate spike in online interest, including about 50,000 posts on X. Five days later, when he promoted a “Trump gold card” visa, his announcement led to roughly 30,000 posts on X.
A barrage that distracts from bad news.
One pattern in Mr. Trump’s behavior: When his administration is faced with bad news, he launches a fusillade of distraction.
This can take the form of outlandish, out-of-left-field claims about political opponents. Or he might weigh in on a pop culture subject far afield from Washington politics – from the ratings of late-night hosts like Seth Meyers to the physical appearance of a megastar like Taylor Swift.
The events of July 2025 offer a case in point.
As the Jeffrey Epstein files returned to the news – along with speculation that Mr. Trump might appear in them – the president embarked on a breathtaking series of tangents. Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that former President Bill Clinton had bankrolled an effort by senior intelligence officials to frame him for a crime, mused about stripping the actress Rosie O’Donnell of her U.S. citizenship, and accused the singer Beyoncé of accepting millions of dollars to endorse his erstwhile rival, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
July 8
F.B.I. publishes memo about Epstein files On July 8, the F.B.I. said it would not declassify more Epstein files.
10
Claimed intelligence officials tried to frame him
10
Pushed to defund NPR and PBS
10 Directed ICE to arrest protesters
12
Threatened Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship
15
Claimed Adam Schiff engaged in mortgage fraud Over the following days, Mr. Trump seemed to lash out in every direction.
On July 18, the Justice Department filed a request to unseal grand jury testimony about Mr. Epstein, again raising questions about Mr. Trump’s involvement. The president promptly lobbed insults at late-night talk show hosts, dismissed the Epstein affair as “fake news” and shared fresh claims about a supposed Obama administration plot to undermine him after the 2016 election.
July 18
Request filed to unseal grand jury testimony
On July 18, the Department of Justice filed a request — later denied — to unseal grand jury testimony.
20
Criticized Washington Commanders name
21
Called the “Russia hoax” the “crime of the century”
22
Called Epstein controversy “fake news”
22
Criticized Kimmel and Fallon
24 Criticized Federal Reserve chairman
Over the following days, Mr. Trump bounced from topic to topic.
On July 25, The Wall Street Journal published a major scoop: The paper had unearthed a risqué birthday letter that Mr. Trump had apparently written to Mr. Epstein in 2003. Mr. Trump responded with his attack on Beyoncé and revived his threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV networks. Then he announced the imminent construction of an enormous gilded ballroom at the White House, at a cost of $200 million. (He has since revised the cost upward to $400 million.)
Asked if there was a deliberate strategy to distract from negative news, Ms. Leavitt noted that every administration seeks to minimize unhelpful headlines.
“Yes, there have been times in which we’ve tried to do that, but also often it just happens naturally, because the president is willing to weigh in on so many subjects,” she said. “Sometimes it’s really not deliberate. It’s just him speaking his mind on whatever news cycle or news story is brought to him in that moment.”
He has added tricks to his arsenal.
Mr. Trump’s devotion to Truth Social mirrors the hair-trigger Twitter habit of his first term; on one recent December evening, he posted 158 times between 9 p.m. and midnight. And he has continued to appear on Fox News with certain preferred hosts.
But this year, he has added to his media arsenal by appearing in many more public spaces that fall outside of a president’s typical itinerary.
Mr. Trump has stopped by a Washington Commanders N.F.L. game, popped up in the New York Yankees locker room, attended the Ryder Cup golf tournament and the men’s tennis final at the U.S. Open, sat ringside at numerous U.F.C. fights, and traveled to the Daytona 500. He is the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl. When FIFA staged the Club World Cup final in New Jersey, Mr. Trump not only attended, but joined the winning team onstage for the trophy ceremony.
The net effect is a sense of inescapability, that no corner of American life remains Trump-free – which itself amounts to a potent expression of presidential authority and command. “His power, in part,” said Mr. Burton, the former Obama aide, “comes from the attention that people give him, or that he forces on them.”
Can it ever be too much?
In the fall of 2009, President Barack Obama appeared on David Letterman’s talk show, gave interviews to CNBC and Men’s Health magazine, and made the rounds of all five major network Sunday shows. Washington was abuzz about whether he was overexposed.
That debate sounds quaint today. But the question of whether a president can be too visible remains open.
“The public is being desensitized” to Mr. Trump’s omnipresence, argued Mr. Brinkley, the historian. “It starts becoming blather. The enemy for Trump isn’t Democrats; it’s the public being bored with the show.”
Ms. Leavitt said that if there was a risk to his ubiquity, “President Trump would not be president right now.” She added: “He is a businessman who speaks his mind and tells it like it is, and sometimes people don’t like that. But obviously the vast majority of our country does, or else he wouldn’t be in this office.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, the public eventually tired of his frenzied pace. And in some ways, Mr. Trump appears to be slowing down physically as he approaches his 80th birthday in June (which he will celebrate in part by staging a nationally broadcast U.F.C. fight on the White House lawn). He has appeared to doze at some Oval Office meetings, and he is holding fewer formal public events than he did at this point in 2017.
Still, Mr. Trump and his team have embraced the everywhere-all-at-once nature of modern media. Average Americans, busy with work and family, do not tune in for daytime news conferences or Cabinet meetings. And 6:30 p.m. newscasts and local newspapers are no longer the primary vessels by which Americans learn about their commander-in-chief.
Instead, politics now suffuses our lives as a kind of ambient noise – via TikTok videos, social media posts, YouTube talk shows and family Facebook messages – never fully separate from our leisure pursuits. “Right now the game is attention, in terms of what’s culturally breaking through,” Mr. Burton said. “The fact that so much message exists is the point.”
Mr. Trump has both propelled this merging of culture and politics, and continues to strategically exploit it. In December, he became the first president to personally host the Kennedy Center Honors, comparing himself onstage to Johnny Carson and musing that he would do a better job than Jimmy Kimmel.
“This is the greatest evening in the history of the Kennedy Center,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “Not even a contest. There has never been anything like it.”
His performance will air in prime time on CBS on Dec. 23.
Photo and video sources: Graham Dickie/The New York Times; Doug Mills/The New York Times; Roll Call Factba.se; PBS; Mauro Pimentel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Kenny Holston/The New York Times; The New York Times; Annabelle Gordon/Reuters; Eric Lee/The New York Times; Fox; Cheriss May for The New York Times; Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press; Margo Martin, via Storyful; Mark Abramson for The New York Times; Global News; Al Drago/Getty Images; Fox News; Dave Sanders for The New York Times; Pete Marovich for The New York Times; Ted Shaffrey/Associated Press … Show all
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