Canceling Your Cable Subscription in New York Won’t Get Easier This Year

Subscription-based companies, from gyms to streaming services to cell phone networks, are infamous for making it fiendishly difficult to quit. Some force subscribers to send cancellations through snail mail or to wait on hold for hours. Others hide cancellation buttons on their websites.

As part of her affordability agenda, Governor Kathy Hochul promised to crack down on this behavior by making it “just as easy to cancel a subscription as it was to sign up.”

But her plan contains a loophole that would exempt many of the major companies that offer subscription services, including:

• AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum, and Verizon;

• all other providers of internet, TV, radio, and phone service; and

• potentially most major music and video streaming platforms, like Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Music, Apple TV+, Apple Music, Audible, Disney+, Max, Hulu, YouTube Premium, and Peacock.

That’s because her proposed law wouldn’t apply to any company regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, or to those companies’ subsidiaries and affiliates.

The plan would also weaken existing regulations on those companies. State law currently gives consumers the right to an easy-to-use cancellation method, including online cancellations of any subscription that was made online. The new law would lift that requirement for the exempted companies.

It’s a “gaping exemption,” according to Erin Witte, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America.

“When you are exempting a pretty large swath of the industry that so famously traps people in subscription products and makes it difficult to cancel, it defeats the purpose of this legislation,” Witte said.

Ted Mermin, a consumer law expert at UC Berkeley, said the New York rule will still do “a lot of good.”

Hochul’s proposal comes on the heels of a similar, but more ambitious, effort from President Joe Biden’s administration. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission, which is charged with consumer protection at a national level, passed a rule known as Click-to-Cancel that requires companies to provide a simple method for canceling any subscription.

Click-to-Cancel doesn’t have exceptions like the ones Hochul is pushing in New York. That was a deliberate choice, said Samuel Levine, who ran the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection during the Biden administration.

“Our rule was industry neutral, because we see problems across sectors with respect to trapping people in subscriptions,” he told New York Focus. “There’s no reason any company in any industry should be able to trap someone in a subscription and prevent them from canceling.”

The federal rule is slated to take effect in May, but it’s not clear whether President Donald Trump’s administration will enforce it. Both Republicans on the FTC’s five-member board last year voted against adopting it. One of those board members, Andrew Ferguson, is now the FTC chair. Several industry groups are also suing to block the rule entirely.

Leaving regulation up to the federal government “would presume regulatory vigilance at the federal level that simply can’t be presumed” under the current administration, said Norman Silber, a consumer law expert at Hofstra University’s law school.

Even if Click-to-Cancel survives, a powerful law specific to New York would offer an additional level of protection, noted Pat Garofalo, a state law expert at the think tank American Economic Liberties Project.

“Can you turn to the state attorney general to enforce the law, or are you fighting for the Federal Trade Commission’s attention along with everybody else in the country?” he said.