Subscription and membership plans that renew automatically got a lot harder to escape cleanly when a federal court threw out the rule meant to fix that problem. The Federal Trade Commission’s amended Negative Option Rule, which would have forced sellers to make cancelling at least as easy as signing up, never took effect. More than a year later, the agency still has not proposed anything to take its place — it has only asked the public whether it should. For households juggling streaming services, meal kits, supplement trials and gym memberships, the practical result is that older, narrower rules are what actually apply right now.
The Preliminary Regulatory Analysis Nobody Wrote
The rule that died was a 2024 overhaul of the FTC’s decades-old Negative Option Rule, built around a central requirement now known as click-to-cancel. Beyond that headline feature, it barred misrepresentations in subscription marketing, required simple cancellation mechanisms, and mandated clear disclosures before a card got charged. Businesses and industry groups challenged it in four federal circuits, and the cases landed together before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. In Custom Communications, Inc. v. FTC, the court vacated the rule entirely, finding that the commission’s failure to issue a legally required preliminary regulatory analysis was “procedurally insufficient” — not a ruling on whether the substance was good policy, but a finding that the agency skipped a required step on the way to writing it.
Because the vacatur wiped out the whole 2024 rule rather than trimming it, none of its consumer protections survived intact. The FTC’s own rule-tracking page still confirms, as of this week, that the rule “is not in effect” and that businesses are not currently subject to it.
Free first-hour card: After a scam call or identity theft, the order of the first steps matters most. Keep the free first-hour action card on hand.
The February Rule That Brought Back 1973, Not 2024
Seven months after the vacatur, the FTC took its only formal action on this rulemaking since the ruling — and it moved backward, not forward. A final rule published February 12, 2026 revised the Negative Option Rule’s text in the Code of Federal Regulations to match what existed before the 2024 amendments ever took effect, reviving the commission’s original 1973 language governing “prenotification negative option plans.” That older rule covers a narrower slice of the negative-option world: continuity clubs that mail merchandise on a set schedule unless a subscriber objects in advance. It does not include the 2024 rule’s broader cancellation, disclosure, or consent requirements written for the streaming subscriptions, app trials and recurring memberships most households actually deal with today. The commission described the change as a “ministerial task” required to conform its regulations to the court’s decision, and it skipped public comment entirely because the change was compelled by the ruling rather than chosen as policy.
An Advance Notice Is Not a Proposed Rule
The FTC’s only other move on this rulemaking came five weeks later. On March 13, 2026, the commission published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking under docket FTC-2026-0265, asking the public whether and how it should amend the Negative Option Rule again. An advance notice sits at the very first stage of federal rulemaking — before a specific proposed rule, before a comment period on actual regulatory text, before any legal obligation for a business changes. Public comments on that notice closed April 13, 2026. In the more than five months since, the commission has not published a notice of proposed rulemaking, a hearing notice, or any other Federal Register filing on this rule; its own rule-tracking page lists nothing newer than the March advance notice. The FTC’s last attempt at this rulemaking took roughly nineteen months to go from a proposed rule to a final one. Starting over from a stage earlier than that puts any actual replacement years away, at best.
ROSCA Still Requires the Easy Cancel Button
None of this leaves subscription sellers free of federal rules in the meantime. The Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, a separate law the FTC has enforced for well over a decade, still bans any online negative-option charge unless a seller clearly discloses the terms before collecting payment information, gets a customer’s express informed consent before billing, and provides a simple way to stop future charges. ROSCA never spelled out exactly what “simple” cancellation has to look like the way the now-vacated 2024 rule tried to — a gap that fed years of litigation over the newer rule’s specificity in the first place. The reinstated 1973 rule adds a second, narrower layer for mail-order continuity clubs, and many states layer their own automatic-renewal disclosure and cancellation laws on top of both. What does not exist, nationally, is a single rule spelling out that cancelling has to be as easy as signing up. That protection ended with the Eighth Circuit’s ruling, and as of this week, nothing has taken its place.
A Cancellation Call That Isn’t From the Company
Confusion about who is actually collecting a subscription payment is exactly the kind of opening scammers exploit. A caller claiming to represent a streaming service, a retailer, or a bank’s fraud department may cite a real charge or a real renewal date to sound convincing, then ask for card numbers or remote computer access to “cancel” the charge. Because no single federal rule currently guarantees a predictable cancellation process, an unexpected call about stopping a subscription is harder for a household to judge on its own.
The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit walks through the first-hour recovery plan for exactly this kind of call and sets up a family code word households can use to confirm that a request for account or payment information is genuinely coming from a relative or a legitimate company, not an impersonator.
Look up the family code word in The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit.
AI-assisted research and drafting; reviewed by an editor.
