The FTC restarts click-to-cancel — and gift subscriptions are the awkward case

What the FTC has restarted

The 2024 Negative Option Rule, announced on 16 October 2024 and universally known as click-to-cancel, required sellers to disclose material terms clearly, obtain express informed consent before charging, and provide a cancellation mechanism at least as simple as the one used to sign up. The Eighth Circuit vacated it in July 2025 on procedural grounds rather than on the merits.

On 13 March 2026 the Commission published an advance notice of proposed rulemaking under docket FTC-2026-0265, with comments due on 13 April. Practitioners reading the notice expect the same four pillars to return: clear and conspicuous disclosure, affirmative express consent to the negative-option feature, a simple cancellation mechanism, and a prohibition on misrepresentation in promoting these plans.

California has not waited. AB 2863 has been in force since 1 July 2025 and already requires consent to auto-renewal as its own separate step rather than bundled into terms acceptance, an annual renewal reminder for yearly subscriptions, and a cancel button displayed on any retention offer page.

Why gift subscriptions are the hard case

Every one of those protections is addressed to a single person who signs up, receives the reminders and clicks cancel. The gift economy splits that person in two. The buyer holds the card and receives the renewal notice; the recipient holds the account and does the using. Neither is well placed to act.

Memoir memberships are the cleanest example, because the whole product is bought by an adult child for an ageing parent. If the parent stops answering in February, the renewal notice goes to the child, who has not opened the app since December and has no idea whether the book is half-finished or untouched. An annual reminder satisfies the letter of California's rule and tells that person almost nothing.

The same shape appears in subscription boxes, streaming bought for a relative, and anything sold with a “perfect gift” badge. A rule that measures cancellation friction in clicks does not see it, because the friction is not in the flow. It is in the fact that the person who would cancel is not the person watching.

What a good answer looks like

The structural answer is not a better cancel button. It is a subscription that has somewhere to stop.

The clearest example in the memoir category is LifePages, whose terms state at clause 3.5.3 that the subscription terminates automatically once all 50 questions have been answered and the book has been dispatched for printing. There is no cancellation to remember because reaching the end of the product and the end of the billing are the same event. Meminto Stories arrives at the same place from the other direction: one payment, no renewal at all.

Compare the default. StoryWorth's $199 tier auto-renews at $99 a year. Remento's annual renewal does not include a new book credit, so year two costs $99 and prints nothing unless you buy a copy at $69. Neither is deceptive and both are clearly stated — but both rely on somebody remembering, and in a gift purchase that somebody has usually stopped paying attention.

If the Commission wants a rule that improves the gift case, the useful question in docket FTC-2026-0265 is not how hard cancelling is. It is whether the product has a natural terminus, and whether the buyer was told what it is.