The Right To Cancel Should Be As Basic As The Right To Refuse

Three years ago I signed up for Spectrum’s high-speed internet in a matter of minutes. I clicked a few boxes, entered a card number, and the service was mine before I had finished my bagel. Leaving, I would learn, is a different kind of transaction entirely, and the gap between those two experiences is the whole subject of this essay.

For most of those three years the service did its job. Over the last six months it began to falter, dropping once or twice a week for reasons no one at the company could ever name. I dislike being at the mercy of a single provider, so I ordered Starlink as a backup. When Spectrum blinked out, my connection quietly failed over to the satellite, and the outages stopped costing me anything. After a while the obvious question arrived. If the backup was carrying the load anyway, why was I still paying for the thing that kept breaking? I decided to move to Starlink full time and disconnect Spectrum.

Then came the dread, and the dread was earned. The cable and internet industry has a reputation, deserved by long practice, of making it nearly impossible to leave. You cannot disconnect online. The company hands you a phone number, and the number is the entrance to a gauntlet. My first call ended with the agent calling me a deadbeat and informing me I had to settle a past due balance before she could help. I have been on auto pay for three years, and my next bill was not scheduled to pull until the 15th. There was no past due balance. She had simply flipped, in the space of a sentence, from good cop to bad cop. When I asked for a supervisor, she hung up on me.

So I started over. On the second call I explained what had happened the first time, that I had patiently answered every question, and that this time I intended to exercise a simpler right, the right to answer nothing at all. I was there to disconnect, and that was the entire content of my request. It did not matter. She still ran the full script, asking each question in turn, and to each one I calmly said I had no response. That call lasted longer than the first. I was placed on hold three or four times. To cancel a service I had every legal right to cancel, I had to outlast a trained employee whose job was to wear me down.

Here is the principle that my afternoon on the phone illustrates. Persistence in a market is like an open door. A genuine market is a room with an entrance and an exit, and a customer is free to use either one. When a company makes the entrance wide and welcoming and turns the exit into a locked maze patrolled by a retention department, it has stopped competing on the quality of what is inside the room. It has started competing on how hard it can make your departure. That is not capitalism. It is rent seeking dressed in a customer service uniform, and conservatives of all people should be the first to name it.

The free market rests on a foundation called consumer sovereignty, the idea that the buyer, not the seller, is the final authority over a purchase. The whole moral and practical case for free enterprise depends on the customer’s power to say no and to walk away. Friedrich Hayek and the tradition that followed him understood that this power to exit is what disciplines a business and keeps it honest. A company that cannot be left is a company that no longer has to earn you. Cancellation friction is therefore not a minor annoyance. It is an attack on the mechanism that makes markets work at all, because it overrides the one decision the market is supposed to leave in the customer’s hands.

Some readers will suspect I am generalizing from a single bad afternoon. I am not. The Federal Trade Commission has catalogued these tactics under the heading of dark patterns, the design tricks that include hard to cancel subscriptions, buried terms, junk fees, and other manipulations of consumer choice. The complaint data tells the story of a problem that is growing, not shrinking. The agency was receiving roughly 42 negative option complaints per day in 2021, nearly 70 per day by 2024, and more than 90 per day in 2025. These come from all 50 states, span dozens of industries, and concern hundreds of companies. This is not a boutique grievance. It is a mass market swindle.

The enforcement record removes any doubt about intent, because the companies have confessed in their own internal documents. When the FTC pursued Amazon over its Prime program, it found that signing up took a single click while canceling required a path the company’s own employees nicknamed the Iliad Flow, after Homer’s epic, complete with multiple pages, six clicks, and fifteen options. Employees described the world of unwanted enrollments as a shady world and called the unwanted subscriptions an unspoken cancer. Amazon agreed to a $2.5 billion resolution, $1 billion in civil penalties and $1.5 billion in refunds, with the FTC estimating that as many as 35 million consumers were affected. Adobe offers an even more candid admission. A senior figure inside the company, according to an unredacted federal filing, described a hidden early termination fee as a bit like heroin for Adobe, conceding there was no way to kill it without a serious hit to the business. The company later settled for $150 million. A fee your own executives compare to a narcotic is not a service feature. It is a dependency the company knew it could not quit.

The pattern repeats across every industry that bills you monthly. New York’s attorney general found that SiriusXM trained its agents not to take no for an answer, routing subscribers through a six part conversation with as many as five retention offers, and the Associated Press reported that more than 578,000 customers simply abandoned their cancellation attempts between 2019 and 2021 because the queues ran so long. That last figure is the quiet heart of the whole scheme. Retention friction does not work by refusing to cancel you outright, which would be plainly illegal. It works by slowing you down until you give up, until the cost of your own time exceeds the price of one more month. The FTC alleged that canceling Uber One could require navigating as many as 23 screens and 32 actions. It accused operators of LA Fitness, a chain with more than 600 locations and over 3.7 million members, of forcing cancellation in person or by mail, sometimes only through one specific employee, even as anyone could sign you up. The mechanism is always the same. Easy in, exhausting out.

Spectrum fits the template precisely, and its parent industry has shown its hand. There is no contract and no early termination fee, which sounds consumer friendly until you try to leave. You must call or visit a store, equipment must be returned within a tight window or you face charges that can reach $200 per item, and you pay for the full billing cycle even if you cancel on the first day of the month. When the FTC tried to fix exactly this conduct with its click to cancel rule, which would have required cancellation to be at least as easy as sign up, the cable industry’s trade association, the group that speaks for Charter, Comcast, and Cox, sued to stop it. When an industry goes to federal court to defend its right to make leaving hard, it has told you everything you need to know about whether the friction is an accident.

That lawsuit succeeded, but only on a technicality, and the distinction matters enormously. In July 2025 the Eighth Circuit vacated the click to cancel rule because the FTC had skipped a required preliminary regulatory analysis once the rule’s economic impact crossed the $100 million threshold. The court ruled on procedure and never reached the merits. It did not bless the underlying conduct, and it did not touch the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, the 2010 statute known as ROSCA that still requires clear disclosure, express consent, and simple cancellation. A New York court has already held that SiriusXM violated ROSCA by making cancellation materially harder than sign up. The law against this behavior did not disappear. Only one particular rule did, and only for failing to fill out the right paperwork.

So the assignment to Congress and the FTC is clear, and both must act. Congress should make the right to cancel a subscription as basic and as protected as the right to refuse one in the first place. The vehicle already exists. The Unsubscribe Act, sponsored in the Senate by Brian Schatz and Republican John Kennedy and reintroduced in the House in January 2026 by Mark Takano, Seth Magaziner, and Republican Mark Amodei, would require that cancellation be as easy as enrollment, that consent be affirmative before a trial converts to a charge, and that companies stop hiding the exit. Kennedy describes the problem in plain language any American recognizes, the headache of running in circles to cancel before a trial expires, the convoluted song and dance routine. Amodei puts it just as plainly, observing that subscription traps have become an accepted inconvenience. They should be made abnormal again, and a clean federal statute, resting on law rather than contested rulemaking, is how you do it.

The FTC need not wait for Congress, and its own chairman has told us as much. Andrew Ferguson has said the agency protects consumers best when it takes bad actors to court and wins, and he has called out deceptive subscriptions that feel impossible to cancel. He should be held to his word. The tools are already in hand, ROSCA and Section 5 and the existing negative option authority that produced the Amazon, Adobe, Uber, and SiriusXM results, and the agency has opened a new rulemaking with a comment window closing April 13, 2026. The right move is to bring more cases now and to rebuild the rule on the procedurally bulletproof record the court demanded, this time with the analysis done correctly so it survives. The Federal Communications Commission, for its part, has already recognized that billing cycle fees and early termination fees penalize subscribers for switching, and it should finish that work for cable and broadband.

Cass Sunstein, who ran regulatory affairs for a Democratic president and is no conservative, wrote that sludge infringes on human dignity, making people feel that their time and even their lives do not matter. He is right, and the point crosses every line we usually argue across. My afternoon with Spectrum was not a tragedy. It was a small, deliberate insult, the kind that millions of Americans absorb quietly every month because fighting back costs more than the charge. A free people should not have to outlast a retention script to stop paying for something they no longer want. Congress should pass the law, the FTC should enforce the one we have, and the exit door should open as easily as the entrance ever did.

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