New York City to ban deceptive subscription practices

bell-cot

No mention of the New York Times, or its practices?

munk-a

I suppose right now there is no federal preemption - but I fully expect gym & similar lobbying at the federal level to get a rule in place to allow preemption challenges.

sxp

It's unclear whether this junk fee law will have teeth. In theory, California has the same anti-drip pricing law, but restaurants have a specific carve out [1] which is bullshit because the drip pricing that most people complain about is the X% "service charges" and "lifestyle fees" that restaurants have at the bottom of their menu in small print. From what I can tell online, NYC rules won't have this carveout, but I haven't eaten there recently so I can't confirm. [1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

drcongo

Any chance you could lend Mamdani to the UK? We have a vacancy.

econ

Maybe it should be required to review quality laws in other countries in general. One advantage is that you don't have to pretend or imagine what will happen if it's been tested in the wild.

aioproductos

I'm building a SaaS right now and made the "non-deceptive" choices this law wants: cancellation is one click from settings, no retention maze, no surprise renewal, 30-day money-back. What surprised me is how much the tooling assumes you want the dark patterns. Billing platforms ship "cancellation flow" templates that are really retention funnels — discount offer, pause offer, survey, guilt screen, then maybe the button. The default path is the deceptive path; you have to actively rip stuff out to be straightforward. Which I think explains why this needs regulation at all. Every individual dark pattern is locally rational — it demonstrably improves net retention, so any PM optimizing a dashboard will keep it. The cost (people who feel trapped and tell everyone) never shows up in the same spreadsheet. Markets are bad at pricing "customers who quietly hate you." The one-click-cancel requirement is the part with real teeth. Junk-fee rules die by carve-out (see California's restaurant exemption), but "cancel must be as easy as signup" is binary enough to actually enforce.

TylerE

A big one I’ve been seeing a lot lately is advertising annual subscriptions as monthly rates. It isn’t $12/month subscription if I have to pay $120 in a lump sum up front. The actual monthly rate is often basically double what they’re advertising.

Razengan

Did a politician's kid rack up hundreds of dollars on some stupid game? I still don't know why Apple, oft parading as the people's champion, automatically converts trials to subscriptions. So many scummy apps exploit this by offering a 1 week trial and saying like "only $4/month!" but charging a 1 year's sub after the trial period ends.

gumby

These rules are great but “landmark” seems like puffery, as California has had such rules for quite a while. Ironically that has meant it’s hard to unsubscribe from the New York Times except in California.

cyberax

Nice. Now just force stores to display actual prices with tax.

ChrisArchitect

Official release: https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/07/mayor-mamdani...

jzer0cool

Nintendo (subscription I have for my switch to access some older a classic games btw) is very good reminding me I have a subscription and whether I want to cancel (or renew). I don't have the email at hand but what I remember is thinking they really desire you to reflect to cancel (rather than a push to renew) if not wanting continued service. Sentiment of politeness and I find a good example what to do. Also, not a subscription but seeing some dark practices after COVID onset at any fast-food like business (including cafes, juices, cupcakes, etc) where a preselected tip is selected. Default should be no.

clonedhuman

OH NO THIS IS THE SOCIALISMS!!!!!111

josefritzishere

This should be federal law.

petilon

Will New York City residents be able to avoid AT&T's "Administrative and Regulatory Cost Recovery Fee"? https://www.al.com/news/2026/07/att-customers-your-cell-phon...

gzer0

Another one that belongs on this list: AI-generated photos in housing listings. You can no longer tell what the property actually looks like, and the images conveniently erase the problem spots you'd only catch in person. False advertising is getting completely out of hand.

nadermx

The irony with all this, is if a company makes it difficult to cancel their subscription, it's probably not a good product. Antidotically, I've found that making it easy for users to not only cancel, but refund, has given me eye opening things to fix in some products that made it so less people cancelled or refunded. So I try to always err on best user experience.

xp84

I wonder if the bit about 'junk fees' will include undisclosed hotel fees. I just stayed there last week in a no-frills "hotel" which doesn't include daily room cleaning, has no staff at night, and has no amenities whatsoever, and they charged me a surprise-at-check-in $35 a night resort fee. This fee was not described in the booking.

Esophagus4

> When the Biden administration introduced a junk fee rule in 2024, the US Chamber of Commerce argued it was “an attempt to micromanage businesses’ pricing structures”, and apartment fees were cut from that federal rule after lobbying by the real-estate industry. This drives me nuts to read, because it’s usually the same pattern. Rule -> lobbyists descend -> politicians cave -> carve out that takes away the whole point of the rule -> everyone declares victory

bkeyes

Funny this should come up today. I just got a notice from my credit card company that Evernote just charged my credit card after 2 'successful' cancellations of my subscription each of the last 2 years, and the complete deletion of my account several months ago. Hopefully these will become more widespread - I'm not in NY or CA.