New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announces 'Click-To-Cancel' rules that tells Netflix, Amazon, Disney, and other companies: Make sure customers can...

Signing up for Netflix takes one click. Cancelling it can take a phone call, a hold queue, and the patience of a saint. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to end that asymmetry, and he's putting the city's biggest subscription services on notice. His new "Click-to-Cancel" rule, announced Friday, forces companies to make quitting as easy as joining. If one click got you into an Amazon, Disney+, or gym membership, one click should get you out—no certified letters, no in-person visits, no maze of retention offers designed to wear you down. It takes effect October 1, making New York the first US city to try it.The rule covers automatic renewals and continuous-service subscriptions, and it's enforced by the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. Companies must disclose their terms plainly and can't charge you to return anything they handed over free as part of a plan. Break the rule and the penalties start at $525 per violation, plus restitution to the customers who got stuck."If you can sign up with one click, you can cancel with one click," Mamdani said at the press conference. He pitched it as an affordability play—businesses have long profited by making the exit harder than the entrance. The Roosevelt Institute estimates the rule could save New Yorkers up to $162.5 million a year, depending on how many forgotten subscriptions finally get killed off.This idea has scar tissue. Lina Khan pushed the same policy nationally as FTC Chair under Biden, only to watch the Eighth Circuit vacate it in 2025 over a procedural error—days before it was set to take effect. Khan now advises Mamdani, having served as a transition co-chair, and she's steering the city-level version. Click-to-cancel protections already exist in states like California, Colorado, and Illinois, but no city has gone this far.It doesn't stop at subscriptions. A companion "junk fees" rule, open to public comment on August 7, would make businesses advertise full prices upfront—the hidden charges that, per Consumer Reports, cost the average family of four roughly $3,200 a year.The real question lands after October 1: whether the city can enforce any of this, and what that enforcement actually costs.