New York City's click-to-cancel rule took effect on Thursday, making it not only the first American city to require businesses to make cancelling a subscription as easy as signing up, but, as far as we can tell, the first standalone city in the world anywhere to have the power to enforce such consumer legislation for itself.

In practice: a gym that lets you join online, for example, can no longer make you phone or visit in person to leave. Residents can file complaints through a new city portal, and businesses face fines starting at $525, roughly R8,900, per violation.

Similar rules already exist in the EU, especially Germany and in the UK, as well as it’s own New York State — but cities don’t normally get to make their own consumer rules. New York has changed that, which can complicate compliance for SaaS products.

The rule arrived at city level because the national one failed. The US Federal Trade Commission spent more than four years building a federal click-to-cancel rule, and an appeals court then struck it down on procedural grounds. Samuel Levine, who led consumer protection at the FTC at the time and now runs New York's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, says the city proposed, finalised and implemented its version within a single year.

The city expects it to save New Yorkers between $ 21.5 million and $ 162.5 million a year, about R363 million to R2.7 billion. Consumers can complain about unclear subscription terms, delays in cancelling, or not being told a subscription would auto-renew. The department reviews each complaint, can contact the business to get money back and cancel the subscription, and can investigate or take legal action where it sees a pattern.

The complaints portal was built in 10 weeks by the mayor's Public Interest Technology team, and Levine says complaints go to staff whose full-time job is handling them, not a chatbot.

The Verge's Lauren Feiner interviewed Levine, who called the pace "the speed of government as it should be" and argued that a good complaints process matters because people who dread dealing with government simply do not report problems. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that if a company can take your money with one click, you should be able to get it back with one click.

In South Africa, the dtic's guide to the Consumer Protection Act sets out the local position: consumers may cancel a fixed-term agreement at any time on 20 business days' written or recorded notice, whatever the contract says. SEESA notes fixed-term consumer agreements are generally capped at 24 months and roll over month to month unless cancelled.

South African consumers already have a strong right to leave. The Consumer Protection Act lets them cancel a fixed-term agreement on 20 business days' notice regardless of the contract, though the supplier may charge a reasonable cancellation penalty.

What the Act does not require is that cancelling be as easy as joining, and that is the gap New York has closed. Anyone who has tried to leave a gym, a streaming service or a software subscription here knows the friction that still exists: the phone-only cancellation line, the retention offer you must sit through, the form that has to be emailed. For a subscription business, that friction buys a few extra months of revenue and costs trust, and trust is harder to rebuild than a churn rate.

The second lesson is about government delivery. A rule written, finalised and live inside a year, with a complaints system built in 10 weeks and staffed by people, is the standard local regulators should be held to, including the NCC's own opt-out registry and provincial projects like the Visit Gauteng marketplace.

You might also like our piece on SA phone contract prices rising twice as fast as the phones, the new DStv packages and their 24-month contract, and why banking scam advice keeps failing.

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