A rule that never got to work

On July 8, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated the Federal Trade Commission’s Click to Cancel rule, the amendment to the Negative Option Rule that would have required every subscription business to make canceling at least as easy as signing up (Butler et al.). The rule was set to take effect within days. It never got the chance.

We covered this rule the day it was finalized, in October 2024, and called it the biggest rewrite of federal subscription law in fifty years. We meant it. Nine months later, a federal appeals court took it off the books before a single subscription business had to answer for missing its compliance deadline.

That’s the headline everyone will run with. Here’s the part worth slowing down for: the Eighth Circuit did not rule that confusing, friction-heavy cancellation flows are legal. It ruled that the FTC broke its own rulemaking process building the rule that would have banned them. Those are two very different outcomes, and the gap between them is where this article lives.

What "vacated" actually means here

Vacated is a specific word, and it deserves more than a skim. The court held that the FTC failed to comply with procedural requirements governing its own rulemaking, and in doing so denied the businesses and trade groups challenging the rule a fair opportunity to weigh in before it became binding (Butler et al.). That is a process finding, not a merits finding. The court never evaluated whether routing a cancellation through a phone call, a retention agent, or a maze of "are you sure" screens is deceptive, unfair, or simply bad business. It didn’t need to reach that question. The FTC’s own procedural misstep ended the case first.

“The FTC failed to comply with procedural requirements governing its rulemaking, and thus deprived the petitioners…of a fair opportunity to participate in the rulemaking process.”

Timothy A. Butler, Matthew M. White, and Tessa L. Cierny, Greenberg Traurig LLP, writing in The National Law Review

That distinction is the whole article. A rule can die on a procedural technicality while the problem it was written to solve stays exactly as real as it was the day before the ruling. Legal observers following the case noted that the FTC’s current leadership seemed unlikely to petition the Supreme Court or launch a new rulemaking to resurrect this specific rule (Butler et al.). Even if that holds, the agency didn’t lose its authority to go after deceptive cancellation practices. It lost one rule, built one particular way, that a court found the agency assembled improperly. The FTC’s broader tools stayed fully intact through this ruling: the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, the Telemarketing Sales Rule, and Section 5 of the FTC Act, the agency’s long-standing authority over unfair and deceptive practices (Butler et al.). So did every state attorney general enforcing their own automatic-renewal statutes.

The standard was never the rule

We wrote when this rule first passed that it didn’t ask businesses to do anything we wouldn’t have already recommended: disclose the real terms, get real consent, let people leave the way they came in. We stand by that after the vacatur, for a simple reason. Good cancellation flows were never good because a regulation said so. They were good because trapping someone inside a subscription they don’t want is a business quietly admitting its product can’t hold a customer on its own merits.

The Nielsen Norman Group defines a deceptive pattern as a design that prompts users toward an action that benefits the business "by deceiving, misdirecting, shaming, or obstructing the user’s ability to make another, less profitable choice" (Rosala). Notice what that definition doesn’t mention. Not the FTC. Not any regulation at all. It describes a design choice and its effect on a real person trying to do something simple. That’s the bar we hold client work to, and a court ruling on the FTC’s paperwork doesn’t move it an inch.

“A deceptive pattern…prompts users to take an action that benefits the company employing the pattern by deceiving, misdirecting, shaming, or obstructing the user’s ability to make another, less profitable choice.”

Maria Rosala, Nielsen Norman Group

What we’re telling clients this week

Some businesses will read this ruling as a green light to slow-walk a redesign already in motion, or worse, to rebuild the friction they’d just spent a budget cycle removing. We’d tell any client asking that this is the wrong read, and not for a compliance reason first.

The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon, filed back in June 2023 and alleging the company enrolled people in Prime without real consent while making cancellation deliberately hard, was never built on the Click to Cancel rule (FTC, "FTC Takes Action Against Amazon"). It was built on Section 5 of the FTC Act, authority that predates this rule and survived its vacatur completely untouched. That case is still working through the system as we publish this. The rule dying doesn’t retroactively make the conduct it targeted acceptable, and it doesn’t remove the other legal paths regulators still have to challenge it.

So the practical advice hasn’t changed since we first wrote it in October. Audit your own cancellation flow the way a frustrated customer would. Sign up the way a real customer would, then try to leave the same way. Count the clicks, the screens, the phone calls it takes to get out, and compare that count to what it took to get in. If leaving takes more effort than joining did, fix it. Not because a rule requires it this month, but because the reasoning behind the rule was sound before it existed and stays exactly as sound now that a procedural ruling took the rule itself off the table.

This is the second entry in a thread we started the day the Click to Cancel rule first passed, and continued in Five UX habits we keep defending. We’ll keep adding to it, because the standard isn’t going anywhere, whatever a court decides about how a regulation got written.