New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has signed executive orders aimed at two consumer annoyances that keep producing very real bills: hidden fees and subscriptions that are easy to start but miserable to stop.
The mayor’s office announced Executive Orders 9 and 10 last week. According to the city, the orders ban hidden junk fees and create a local “click to cancel” requirement, meaning businesses must let consumers end subscriptions through a process as easy as the one used to sign up.
“For years, companies have built their business model around making it harder for working people to hold onto their money,” Mamdani said in the announcement. He pointed to fees that appear at checkout and subscriptions that take one click to begin but many steps to cancel. “If you can sign up with one click, you can cancel with one click,” he said.
The city’s move revives, at the municipal level, a consumer-protection rule the Federal Trade Commission adopted in late 2024 under then Chair Lina Khan. The FTC’s rule targeted recurring subscriptions and other negative-option programs, where a consumer’s silence or failure to act can be treated as consent to keep charging them.
The FTC said at the time that cancellation had to be at least as simple as enrollment. That was meant to address a familiar trap: a website lets customers subscribe in seconds, then forces them into phone calls, retention scripts, extra screens, or other friction when they try to leave.
That federal rule did not survive long enough to do much work. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked it before it took effect, siding with challengers that included gym companies, marketing firms, and insurance companies. The decision left the FTC’s national click-to-cancel effort dead for now, shifting attention to states and cities willing to write their own rules.
New York City’s orders also arrive as other Biden-era consumer disclosure efforts have been rolled back or attacked. The FCC’s broadband “nutrition label,” which required internet providers to list fees and terms in a standardized format, was another attempt to make pricing less of a scavenger hunt. The Trump administration has moved to end that rule, according to Ars Technica.
The harder part for New York City will be enforcement. Passing a rule is the cheap part. Making companies comply, especially companies with lawyers and a talent for inventing procedural fog machines, takes staff, money, and political stamina.
That problem has shown up elsewhere. Techdirt has reported that some companies have ignored state right-to-repair laws after those laws were enacted. CBS News Chicago reported that Illinois’ junk-fee law included exemptions for several industries, limiting how broadly the ban applied.
If New York City follows through, the orders could give residents a practical right that federal regulators tried and failed to secure nationwide: the ability to stop paying for a service without first solving a customer-service escape room. If enforcement is thin, the rule risks becoming another good PDF on a government website.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.