A vacated FTC rule reverted to its pre-2024 text

The figure or the record

On 12 February 2026 the Federal Trade Commission published a Federal Register notice reverting its Negative Option Rule to the text that existed before a 2024 amendment took effect. That amendment, finalised as the click-to-cancel rule and published 15 November 2024, would have required a clear disclosure before charging, affirmative consent to any negative-option feature, and a cancellation mechanism at least as easy as sign-up. It never reached its intended effective date of 14 January 2025 without challenge: the Commission's own 2026 notice records that businesses and industry groups petitioned four federal circuits, the cases were consolidated in the Eighth Circuit, and that court vacated the 2024 rule.

What the documents establish

The February 2026 notice names the case and the ground: Custom Commc'ns, Inc. v. FTC, 142 F.4th 1060 (8th Cir. 2025), which the Commission's own text says found its failure to issue a preliminary regulatory analysis for the 2024 rule procedurally insufficient under section 22 of the FTC Act. That is a process defect, not a ruling on whether the underlying disclosure and consent requirements were themselves unreasonable; the notice does not record the court reaching that question. Because the vacatur removed the 2024 rule rather than replacing it, the Commission's account is that the older rule, the pre-2024 Rule Concerning Recurring Subscriptions and Other Negative Option Programs, resumed force automatically, and the February 2026 notice exists to make that reversion explicit in the Code of Federal Regulations rather than to create new obligations.

Scope and caveats

Everything above is what the FTC's own Federal Register notice records about a court's decision; it is not a reading of the Eighth Circuit's opinion itself, which this record does not reproduce beyond the quoted holding and citation. The notice gives the year of the decision, 2025, and the case citation, but not the exact day the court ruled, so this account cannot responsibly assign a specific calendar date to the vacatur beyond that. Nor does the notice say what, if anything, replaces the substantive click-to-cancel protections nationally: it restores prior federal text, narrower than the 2024 rule, leaving the subject largely to state law and to the FTC's own separate March 2026 advance rulemaking notice on future amendments.

What to watch

Editorially, the detail worth tracking is whether the FTC's pending advance rulemaking, opened in March 2026, produces a narrower click-to-cancel rule built to survive the same procedural objection, since the Eighth Circuit's stated defect was curable by process rather than by rewriting the substance.

• Does the restored pre-2024 rule text, on its own, require anything about cancellation ease for a coin-subscription app?
• Has the FTC's 2026 advance rulemaking produced a proposed replacement rule, and does it include a regulatory analysis this time?
• What does state law require in the jurisdictions where the app actually sells, given that no federal click-to-cancel rule is currently in force?

The record here is narrow and precise: a 2024 rule, a 2025 vacatur on procedural grounds, and a 2026 notice restoring the prior text. Reading it as the click-to-cancel requirement being struck down as unreasonable overstates what the Commission's own document says the court held.