When consumers are asked to identify their most frustrating interaction with businesses, the obstacles to canceling an automatically-renewing service invariably rank high.

Some companies require cancellations to be done by phone, or even in person. Even finding a cancellation option on a merchant’s website can be daunting. Cancellation can require multiple steps online, or waiting for hours on hold — before a call just gets dropped without warning.

Millions of consumers have ended up paying unwittingly for services or goods they no longer want or need, sometimes for years.

So unsurprisingly, the Federal Trade Commission last year finalized a “click to cancel” rule, requiring that it be as easy to cancel a recurrent subscription as it is to sign up.

Also unsurprisingly, the rule came under immediate attack from Big Business, via a federal lawsuit filed last year by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business lobbies.

Possibly most unsurprisingly, a three-judge appeals court panel in St. Louis (two appointed by Trump and one by George H.W. Bush) threw out the rule on Tuesday — less than a week before it was to take effect and after more than five years of painstaking administrative and regulatory work — on a legal technicality.

Whether the rule will be resurrected by today’s FTC is unclear; the commission told me by email it’s still “considering our options.” The FTC’s two GOP commissioners — including Andrew Ferguson, who was elevated to the chairmanship by Donald Trump in January — dissented in the 3-2 vote last year to make the rule final. Ferguson succeeded Biden appointee Lina Khan, who told podcaster Pablo Torre last month that the rule had “enormous support” from the public.

The commission has sued several companies over their automatically-renewing subscription services, including Amazon, Adobe and Uber, which it sued as recently as April. Those cases are pending.

In announcing the Uber lawsuit, Ferguson observed that “Americans are tired of getting signed up for unwanted subscriptions that seem impossible to cancel” and said the commission “is fighting back on behalf of the American people.”

Before delving more deeply into the court’s ruling, here’s some background on why the rule was drafted in the first place.

Its target was “negative option” programs, in which businesses assume customers have consented for automatic renewals unless the customers explicitly cancel. These programs were pioneered by book-of-the-month clubs and similar others, which delivered merchandise to members unless the members told them to skip their monthly offerings.

When the FTC first moved against this practice with a 1973 rule, its quarries were 72 book clubs and four record clubs. The practice mushroomed, especially during the pandemic, when people signed up for automatic deliveries of goods or streamed entertainment so they wouldn’t have to leave the house.

By 2022, businesses were making a mint from auto-renewals, relying on “lapses in consumer memory and on a lack of fluency with technology,” as 11 law professors told the appeals judges in a friend-of-the-court brief.

Seniors who forget what they have signed up for and can’t easily navigate online procedures and parents of young children who get snared into signing up for subscriptions tend to be the most common victims.

Opinion polls revealed that more than half of all consumers had faced unwanted charges at some point from these programs. Almost three-quarters of respondents to a survey by JPMorgan Chase said they were wasting more than $50 a month on automatic payments for goods or services they no longer needed. A cottage industry of firms purporting to help consumers track down their forgotten subscriptions sprung up — typically operating on the same subscription model.

Think all this was accidental? Think again.

When the FTC started investigating negative option programs, “we were stunned to see just how deliberate a business strategy it is,” Khan, who oversaw the regulation’s development, told Torre.

In 2019, the FTC began working on expanding its 1973 regulation of book clubs to cover all forms of negative option marketing and published a final rule last November. The rule required businesses to clearly disclose all costs and terms of their programs, to obtain explicit enrollment consent from customers and to provide a means of cancellation that is “at least as easy to use” as signing up. In other words, if it took two clicks to sign up, it would have to take no more than two to cancel.

In a parallel effort, in 2023, the FTC sued Amazon over the enrollment and cancellation procedures for its Prime memberships, which afford enrollees discounted shipping fees and access to Amazon’s video and music streaming services for annual or monthly fees.

The agency asserted that the giant online retailer had “knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime” and “knowingly complicated the cancellation process for Prime subscribers who sought to end their membership.”

Amazon enticed nonmember customers into signing up for Prime by showering them with repeated come-ons while they tried to finalize a purchase, the FTC said. Some of these messages, the FTC said, obscured that customers who responded to seemingly free offers were actually signing up for Prime.

After the FTC told Amazon it was investigating its approach, the company made the signup process more transparent. The agency asserted, however, that even after internal analyses showed Amazon executives that having customers “sign up without knowing they did” was a major “customer problem,” higher-ups pushed back against efforts to clarify the sign-up process online.

The reason, the agency said, is that the “clarity improvements” drove subscription numbers down. Prime executives ultimately “pulled the plug” on the changes, the FTC said.

Perhaps more frustrating for consumers was what the FTC labeled the “labyrinthine” procedure to cancel Prime memberships. This was known inside Amazon, the FTC said, as the “Iliad flow,” a term that evokes the seemingly endless Trojan War as described in Homer’s epic. It was, as the agency laid it out, a “four-page, six-click, fifteen option” cancellation process.

Amazon pared down the process in early 2023, shortly before the FTC filed its lawsuit but after the agency sent it civil investigative demands — a form of subpoena — related to the signup and cancellation processes.

In its answer to the lawsuit, Amazon said that its signup and cancellation procedures complied with federal law by “prominently and repeatedly disclosing key terms, obtaining express informed consent from consumers, and offering a simple cancellation method.” The company also disputed the FTC’s “characterization” of its enrollment and cancellation practices.

The claims in the FTC lawsuit, the company said, are “factually unsupported, legally unprecedented, and wholly antithetical to the FTC’s mission of protecting consumers.” It said that it had established an internal team to analyze customer complaints, and that although the team’s studies arose from “anecdotal feedback expressed from a relatively small number of customers,” it “took that feedback seriously” and made efforts to address the concerns.

The FTC lawsuit is currently scheduled to go to trial in Seattle on Sept. 22.

Businesses that fear the sting of the FTC’s crackdown maintained that the agency had been trying to stamp out a consumer benefit. Auto-renew terms, argued purveyors of home service contracts in a friend-of-the-court brief, appreciate automatic renewals “because they take one thing off their plate given busy workdays, hectic family schedules, or other demanding circumstances.”

The appeals judges expressed some empathy with the victims of marketing scams. “We certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing,” they wrote.

But they subjected the commission’s rulemaking procedure to pitiless quibbling. The commission had failed at one point to issue a “preliminary” regulatory analysis of its proposed rule, as required by law in some cases. But the FTC did issue a “final” analysis, which was available for public comment.

Yet there could be little in a preliminary analysis that the final analysis wouldn’t cover, and businesses had every opportunity to pick it apart (as they did). Nevertheless, because of the FTC’s shortcut, the judges said, the business community “lost a notable opportunity to dissuade the FTC” from issuing the rule.

Is that plausible? Industry could hardly be unaware that the rule was under consideration; businesses had mobilized to protect negative option marketing starting at least in 2019, and they hardly lacked for resources to “dissuade” the commission.

This ruling looks more like a reflection of the observation of Dickens’ Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist: “The law is a ass.” The rule addressed a known consumer abuse that had received bipartisan condemnation in Congress over the years. In developing the rule, the FTC solicited public comment at virtually every stage.

Moreover, the rule addressed a marketing process that is destined to keep mushrooming. Companies that used to market their products on a buy-once, use-forever basis have turned to subscription models that allow them to collect fees once a month or annually into the limitless future. If buyers forget that they subscribed and don’t notice the regular charges on their credit card or bank statements, so much the better.

“Everything wants to be a subscription now,” Khan told Torre. “Firms have identified this as a key revenue source, and they’ve noted that to fully monetize that, they need to make it as easy to sign up and as difficult to cancel” as they can. So they implemented “explicit strategies to make that happen.”

Three conservative judges have given those strategies new life. It’s up to the FTC to make its chairman’s promise a reality.

SEOUL — As the Trump administration has been churning out trade threats this week, South Korea, a crucial trading partner and military ally, has been struggling — like many — to navigate the uncertainty that looms over trade negotiations with Washington.

On Monday, Trump sent a letter dictating new tariff rates to 14 countries including South Korea, which was hit with a 25% tax. The levies were set to kick in Tuesday, but were postponed to Aug. 1. Trump left the door open for another extension, telling reporters the new deadline was “firm but not 100% firm,” depending on what trade partners could offer.

But it’s unclear whether the additional three weeks will be enough to resolve the longstanding disagreements between Washington and Seoul. One of the biggest points of contention is South Korea’s auto industry, which was the third biggest exporter of automobiles to the U.S. last year.

Although White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday that Trump’s phone was ringing “off the hook from world leaders all the time who are begging him to come to a deal,” the tone in Seoul has been reserved.

Last week, ahead of the initial July 8 deadline, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, who took office last month, said “it’s difficult to say for certain that we can finish [the trade talks] by July 8.”

“Both sides are doing their best and we need to come up with an outcome that can be mutually beneficial to both parties, but we still have not yet been able to clearly establish what each party wants,” he added.

Since then, senior South Korean trade officials have been dispatched to Washington with the hopes of bringing a deal within striking distance.

“It’s time to speed up the negotiations and find a landing zone,” Trade Minister Yeo Han-koo said after meeting with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Monday.

So far, the only two countries that have struck new trade deals with the Trump administration are the U.K. and Vietnam.

But the Lee administration has maintained a note of caution. At a high-level meeting held Tuesday to discuss the current state of the negotiations, Lee’s presidential chief of staff for policy, Kim Yong-beom, reportedly emphasized the “national interest” over speedy dealmaking, instructing officials to support tariff-affected industries and “diversify” South Korea’s export markets.

Under a decades-long free trade agreement, South Korean tariffs on most U.S. goods are already zero, meaning there are fewer concessions Seoul can offer, analysts say. And on the key points of contention such as automobiles, there is little daylight to be found.

“This announcement will send a chilling message to others,” Wendy Cutler, vice president of the Washington-based Asia Society Policy Institute and former deputy U.S. trade negotiator, said in a post on X.

Trump’s letter also suggested that the U.S. will “not be open to reprieves” from sectoral tariffs, including those on automobiles, Cutler added.

South Korean trade officials have stressed that removing or significantly reducing the 25% tariffs on cars is a top priority.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt holds a trade letter sent by the White House to South Korea during a news conference on Monday.

(Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

But South Korean cars from Hyundai and Kia factor significantly into the $66-billion trade deficit that Trump has decried as unfair. Last year, South Korea was the third biggest exporter of automobiles to the United States, to the tune of $34.7 billion. It bought $2.1 billion worth of cars from the U.S.

Until now, the country’s flagship automakers Hyundai and Kia have been able to sidestep any major tariff shocks, achieving instead record sales in the first half of the year by selling existing inventory in the U.S.

But many believe it is only a matter of time until they will have to raise vehicle sticker prices, as some competitors have done. Both companies’ operating profits are now forecasted to hit double-digit declines compared with the previous year.

The U.S. has also reportedly demanded concessions that touch on sensitive issues of food or national security in South Korea — a far harder sell to the public than the expanded manufacturing cooperation that South Korea has sought to center in the trade talks.

Among these are opening up South Korea’s rice market to U.S. imports and allowing Google to export high-precision geographic data to its servers outside of South Korea.

As an essential crop that represents a significant portion of farmers’ incomes, rice is one of the few heavily protected goods in South Korea’s trade relationships. Under its free trade agreement with the United States, Seoul imposes a 5% tariff on U.S. rice up to 132,304 tons, and 513% for anything after that.

U.S. Army soldiers attend a ceremony last month in Dongducheon, South Korea. A 2021 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that it cost $19.2 billion to maintain American troops in South Korea from 2016 through 2019.

(Kim Jae-Hwan / SOPA Images via Getty Images)

The South Korean government has long denied Google’s requests to export high-precision geographic data — which is used for the company’s map services — on the grounds that it could reveal sensitive military sites that are essential for defense against North Korea. Last year, Ukraine accused Google of exposing the locations of some of its military systems to Russia.

Equally vexing are Trump’s long-running demands that Seoul should pay more to host the some 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea.

“South Korea is making a lot of money, and they’re very good. They’re very good, but, you know, they should be paying for their own military,” Trump said at a White House Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, adding that he told South Korea it should pay $10 billion a year.

Over a four-year period from 2016 through 2019, the total cost of maintaining U.S. troops in South Korea was $19.2 billion, or around $4.8 billion a year, according to a 2021 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Over that period, South Korea footed about 30% of the total annual costs, in addition to providing indirect financial support such as waived taxes or foregone rents.

Under the Special Measures Agreement, the joint framework that governs this arrangement, Seoul’s payments have grown over time. Under the latest version, which covers 2026 to 2030, Seoul’s annual contribution beginning next year will be $1.19 billion, an 8.3% increase from 2025, and will increase yearly thereafter.

Trump’s demand for nearly 10 times that — along with the threats that the U.S. might pull its troops from the country — has previously drawn widespread outrage in the country, spurring calls by some for the development of South Korea’s own nuclear arsenal.

“The Special Measures Agreement (SMA) guarantees stable conditions for U.S. troops stationed in Korea and strengthens the joint South Korea – U.S. defense posture,” a spokesperson for South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in response to Trump’s comments.

“Our stance is that the South Korean government will adhere to the 12th SMA, which was agreed upon and implemented in a legitimate manner.”

What’s the most downtrodden and persecuted minority in America?

If you said it’s transgender youths, immigrant workers or women trying to access their reproductive health rights, you’re on the wrong track.

The correct answer, judging from a surge in news reporting over the last couple of weeks, is the American billionaire.

Concern about the welfare of this beleaguered minority (there are about 2,000 billionaires in the U.S.) has been triggered — or re-triggered — by the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s June 24 Democratic primary.

A self-described “democratic socialist,” Mamdani has had to weather bizarrely focused questions from cable news anchors and others about comments he has made about extreme wealth inequality in the U.S., and specifically in New York.

“I don’t think that we should have billionaires,” he told Kristen Welker of NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 29.

Welker had asked Mamdani, “Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist?” This was a weirdly tendentious way of putting the question. She made it sound as though he advocated lining billionaires up against a wall and shooting them. In fact, what he has said is that the proliferation of billionaires in America, and the unrelenting growth in their fortunes over the last decades, signified a broken economic system.

Nevertheless, the billionaire class and their advocates in the media and on cable news expressed shock and dismay at the very idea. “It takes people who are wealthy in New York to maintain the museums, maintain the hospitals,” John Catsimatidis, a billionaire real estate and supermarket tycoon, fulminated on Fox News. “Do you know how much money we put up to contribute toward museums and hospitals and everything?”

Catsimatidis may not have realized that he had proved Mamdani’s case: In New York and around the country, a tax structure that indulges the 1% with tax breaks has forced austerity on museums and hospitals and services that should be publicly supported. They’re public goods, and they shouldn’t be dependent on the kindness of random plutocrats.

The sheer scale of billionaire wealth in the U.S. prevents most people from understanding how historically outsized it is. “To own $1 billion is to possess more dollars than you’ll ever count,” observed Timothy Noah of the New Republic in a must-read takedown of the American oligarchy published last month. “It’s to possess more dollars than any human being will ever count. And that’s just one billion. Forbes counts 15 Americans who possess hundreds of billions.”

The most comprehensive defense of billionaires appeared July 1 in the Financial Times. It was written by Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business think tank that has advocated against increasing the minimum wage (in a article by Strain), against the Dodd-Frank post-Great Recession banking reforms, against environmental legislation and against tobacco regulations, among other bete noires of the right.

“We should want more billionaires, not fewer,” Strain writes. “While amassing their fortunes, billionaires make the rest of us richer, not poorer.”

Exhibit A on Strain’s docket is Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com magnate whose recent wedding in Venice is estimated to have cost as much as $25 million, tasteful and unassuming as we all know it to have been.

Strain cites the common estimate of Bezos’ personal fortune at about $240 billion. He then applies a calculation developed by Nobel economics laureate William D. Nordhaus in 2004, that only 2.2% of the social value of innovations is captured by the original innovators. If Bezos’ $240 billion is 2.2% of the social value of Amazon’s revolution in retailing, then Bezos must have created $11 trillion in wealth for the rest of us.

“Not a bad deal,” Strain writes.

Strain’s interpretation of Nordhaus is hopelessly half-baked. First, Nordhaus was talking about the gains captured by corporations, not individual entrepreneurs. Also, his estimate arose from abstruse economic formulas and lots of magic asterisks.

Nordhaus didn’t present his findings as a defense of any particular economic policies — the 2.2%, he wrote, was excess or “Schumpeterian” profits, those exceeding what would be expected from the normal return from invested capital, which implies that they’re somewhat illegitimate.

Further, it makes no sense to start with an individual entrepreneur’s wealth and extrapolate it to the social value of his or her innovation. It would be more appropriate to try to estimate the social value of the innovation, and then ask whether the innovator’s profits are too much, not enough, or just right.

I asked Strain to justify his treatment, but didn’t hear back.

Another issue with Strain’s advocacy is that he depicted every innovation as the product of a single person’s efforts. Elsewhere in his op-ed, he wrote that Bill Gates and Michael Dell “have made hundreds of millions of workers more productive by creating better software and computers, driving up their wages.”

He also cited Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who “revolutionized email, internet search and mapping technology”; he added that “many of us would eagerly shell out money every month for these services, if they weren’t provided by Google free of charge.”

(Is that so? If Google thought that consumers would eagerly pay for its services, you can be sure the company would find a way to charge for them, instead of making its money from advertising and sponsorship deals.)

This isn’t the first time that billionaires have felt abused by the zeitgeist. Back in 2021, I wrote that America plainly leads the world in its production of whining billionaires. My example then was Leon Cooperman, a former hedge fund operator who appeared on Bloomberg to grouse about proposals for a wealth tax. He called them “all baloney,” though a viewing of the broadcast suggested he was about to use another label beginning with “B” and caught himself just in time.

A few years earlier, in a ghastly letter published in the Wall Street Journal, Silicon Valley venture investor Thomas Perkins compared the suffering he and his colleagues in the plutocracy had experienced due to public criticism to that of Jews facing Nazi pogroms. “I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich,’” Perkins wrote.

The truth, of course, is that while rich entrepreneurs love to pose as one-man bands, every one of them acquired their wealth with the help and labor of thousands of others. Many of the rank-and-file workers without whom Bezos, Dell and their fellow plutocrats could have reached their pinnacles of fortune have struggled in the oligarchic economy, relying on public assistance to make ends meet.

Bill Gates didn’t originally create “better software” — Microsoft’s original product was a computer operating system he sold to IBM, but which was developed by someone else, Gary Kildall. As of last year, Microsoft employed more than 220,000 people. Dell’s original innovation wasn’t a better PC, but a system of selling clones of IBM PCs by mail order.

It’s proper to question whether any of these innovations have been unalloyed social boons. Amazon may have revolutionized retail, but at the cost of driving untold mom-and-pop stores, and even some big chains, out of business, and paying its frontline workers less than they’re worth.

As for its benefits for consumers, in a lawsuit filed in 2022, California accused Amazon of hobbling retail market competition by having “coerced and induced its third-party sellers and wholesale suppliers to enter into anticompetitive agreements on price.”

The state said that “Amazon makes consumers think they are getting the lowest prices possible, when in fact, they cannot get the low prices that would prevail in a freely competitive market.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Amazon says the state’s claims are “entirely false and misguided,” and denies the state’s assertion that its agreements with vendors and suppliers are designed to “prevent competition” or “harm consumers.” The case is scheduled to go to trial in San Francisco state court in October 2026.

That brings us back to Mamdani. In questioning whether billionaires should exist in the U.S., he was implicitly repeating an observation favored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.): “Every billionaire is a policy failure,” a phrase generally attributed to AOC adviser Dan Riffle.

Riffle’s point is that the accumulation of such wealth reflects policies that exacerbate economic inequality such as tax breaks steered toward the richest of the rich, leading to the impoverishment of public services and programs. That trend has been turbocharged by the budget bill President Trump signed on July 4, which slashes government programs to preserve tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy enacted in 2017 by a Republican Congress and signed by Trump.

Mamdani adeptly underscored that point during his appearance on “Meet the Press.” “I don’t think that we should have billionaires,” he told Welker, “because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of so much inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country.”

His prescription is to raise the state corporation tax by several percentage points to match that in neighboring New Jersey, and to add a 2-percentage-point city surcharge on incomes over $1 million, and use the revenue to finance free bus service, free child care and other public services.

The focus by cable news and other media organizations on the idea that Mamdani would erode New York’s economic base by driving the ultra-rich out of the city was as dubious as it was sadly predictable. Some of them have been feeding on spoon-fed pap by the rich and powerful for so long that — as A.J. Liebling once put it — they need to relearn how to chew. Then Mamdani would get a fair shake, and so would the rest of us.