[jjoonathan]

I'm not sure you're familiar with how the "you can't cancel" trick works.

The situation in TFA is what happens if you try to escalate an ignored cancellation request by stopping payment. The company graciously extends debt to cover the service that you surely didn't intend to cancel, and when your balance -- augmented by late fees, of course -- has grown to be worth their while, they try to collect.

Variations on this theme exist. Sometimes you take a less than completely active role in the sign-up process and only learn about it on collection. Sometimes you "successfully" cancel and they just fail to process it. The common theme here is ongoing transactions for ongoing service (that isn't actually delivered) in the absence of ongoing consent. It's dysfunctional that we allow this in any form, regardless of whether the form in TFA is slightly less dysfunctional or slightly more dysfunctional than the most common form, which is what I structured my comment around.

If subscription services had to register with your credit card, credit reporting agencies, or some authority that gave you a (complete!) list and a cancel button, all of these problems would go away, along with the awful business models that they enable.

[Supermancho]

Oh, I'm familiar. Lots of people are familiar. This is a question of tort law wrapped in corporate sponsored "mandatory mediation", which never rules in your favor or delays. I am asserting that while the dispute is small it can be quickly resolved because the court is happy to mediate immediately regardless of the contractual body appointed.

It's when you exceed the small claims or wait, ie you're afraid to go to court or are lapse in monitoring your own finances, that the problem accelerates out of control.