This week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) quietly published a petition to reopen its Click to Cancel rulemaking and invited the public to submit comments through January 2, 2026. If you offer a continuity program, free trial, or other negative option program and have thoughts about the agency’s next regulatory move, now’s your chance to weigh in.

Businesses operating in this space have undoubtedly been following the FTC’s journey to overhaul its longstanding Negative Option Rule into the “Click to Cancel” Rule. In October 2024, the FTC finalized edits it described as designed to consolidate the patchwork of regulations and provide businesses with clear rules of the road. But, before the FTC had a chance to use the revised Rule in an enforcement action, the Eighth Circuit vacated it on fairly technical grounds, holding that the FTC made a procedural error in the rulemaking process.

Since then, we’ve been watching to see what the FTC would do next. And, for a while it seemed like the answer was probably that, when it spotted problematic practices in the subscription space, the FTC would just continue to bring enforcement actions under laws like the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA) and the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), with some assistance from states with automatic renewal laws.

But, on November 26, 2025, the FTC received a petition from the Consumer Federation of America and the American Economic Liberties Project requesting that the agency reopen the rulemaking and adopt the previously-proposed language. As we noted in our last post, although the Trump/Vance FTC has followed the administration’s lead on prioritizing deregulation, it also defended the Rule before it was vacated, so it’s possible that this petition is the prod the agency needs to reboot the rulemaking process.

If this issue matters to you or your business, sharpen your pencil and get your comment in ASAP. Need help? Give us a call.