10/04/2026
Starting this week, any company that let a New Yorker sign up with one click has to let them cancel with one click, or refund every dollar it billed after they first tried to leave.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani's click-to-cancel rule took effect October 1, making New York the first city in America to outlaw the subscription trap, and the woman corporate lawyers thought they'd beaten is helping him enforce it.
Her name is Lina Khan.
As Biden's FTC chair, Khan passed a national click-to-cancel rule in 2024. Cable giants, Hollywood studios and ad companies sued.
In July 2025, days before it kicked in, a federal appeals court wiped it out. The judges never said trapping customers was fair. The FTC had skipped a preliminary economic analysis, so the whole rule died on procedure.
Trump's FTC reopened the issue this spring. It has produced nothing since.
So Khan went to work for Mamdani. And New York just did it.
Here's the con the rule kills. Companies make joining effortless and leaving miserable because every month you give up on the phone tree is a month they get paid for nothing. The retention maze is the business model.
Now, if you signed up online, you cancel online.
Companies can't force you onto the phone, hang up on you, bury the instructions, or scare you about what happens if you leave. Price, renewal date and how to cancel must be spelled out before they ever touch your card.
Break the rule and it costs $525 for a first offense, climbing to $3,500 for repeat offenders, with no cap. On top of that, the business owes back everything it charged after your first attempt to quit.
Mamdani announced it, per The Nation, at a press conference inside a Lower Manhattan gym. Fitting. The city's consumer agency logged dozens of complaints last year from people who couldn't escape gym contracts, and it has already sent warnings to hundreds of gyms.
The Roosevelt Institute estimates New Yorkers will keep between $21.5 million and $162.5 million a year that used to leak out through forgotten subscriptions.
Remember, Amazon paid $2.5 billion last year to settle FTC charges that it tricked people into Prime and made leaving a slog. Corporate America still called click-to-cancel government overreach.
"New Yorkers shouldn't need a personal trainer to cancel a gym membership," Mamdani said.
Republicans have made him their favorite villain. His crime: a button that says Cancel, and actually works.
___
