You clicked one button to subscribe. It took about ten seconds. Now try to cancel. Suddenly there's a phone number to call, and when you call, you're put on hold. A chat bot asks if you're still there. You get an offer to stay, and then a better one. Then there's a form to fill in — and an email to confirm the form. Getting in took one click. Getting out takes an afternoon.

That gap — easy in, hard out — is not sloppiness. It is the product. Every extra step on the way out makes a few more people give up, and the people who give up keep paying. This month, Australia made that trap illegal. But "just make leaving easy" turns out to be one of the hardest rules anyone has ever tried to write.

On the second of July 2026, Australia's parliament passed a law aimed at subscription traps — services that make money by being hard to leave. It's the biggest upgrade to Australian consumer law in a decade, in force from July 2027. It goes after the cancel button buried five clicks deep, the unsubscribe link hidden where you'll never find it, the free trial that quietly turns into a charge. Fines run up to a hundred million Australian dollars, with no small-business loophole.

But notice how it's written. It doesn't hand you a checklist. It sets a broad principle: you can't design your service to unfairly push people into choices they wouldn't otherwise make — wide enough to catch tricks nobody has invented yet. America tried the opposite: a sharp, specific version of the same idea. A court threw it out. We'll come back to why.

The argument you might expect is about subscriptions themselves — convenience or scam. But that's not the useful question, because the law doesn't ban a single service. It doesn't care that you subscribe. It cares about one thing: the gap between how you get in and how you get out.

On the way in, the door swings open at a touch, because any friction there costs the company a sale. On the way out, you hit a maze, because friction there keeps the money flowing. Same company, two completely different doors, built that way on purpose. That gap is the whole story — and it shows up anywhere it's easy to say yes and strangely hard to say no.

A market keeps sellers honest through one simple threat: if the deal goes bad, you leave. A business that knows you can walk has to keep you happy. So make walking expensive — but not with a fee. A fee is visible, and people get angry at fees. Make it expensive with friction instead: a call instead of a click, a hold, an offer, a form. None of it is a wall. At each step, a few more of the people who meant to cancel just don't — they get busy, they'll do it next week, and next week never comes.

Add up enough small steps, and a real share of people keep paying for something they already decided to quit. The friction isn't a side effect of a clunky website — it's a machine for turning "I want out" into "I'll deal with it later." And "later" is where the money is. No single step is the trap; the trap is all of them together. Which is why you can't outlaw a confirmation screen. You have to outlaw the pattern — the whole shape of how the steps add up.

Why is that pattern so hard to ban? Because it isn't one thing you can point at. On its own, a confirmation screen is fine; so is an offer to stay, and so is a form. What you're trying to outlaw is the deliberate gap between the easy door and the hard one — and a gap is a slippery thing to write into law. There are really only two ways to try. A sharp line spells out exactly what's required. A broad principle just forbids the unfair design. One is precise but rigid; the other bends to fit anything but nobody's quite sure what it means. Whichever you pick, you pay a price.

But first, an honest complication — and it's the reason none of this is simple. Not all friction is a trap. Asking "are you sure?" once, or checking that it's really you cancelling, is fair — even kind. The thing worth banning was never friction itself; it's friction built to be unequal on purpose. So any rule has to do a hard thing: get rid of the maze without getting rid of the honest "are you sure?"

So how do you make leaving as easy as joining, without banning subscriptions? The first is the sharp line: leaving must be as easy as joining, same channel, same steps — anyone can check it. But it's gamed in the borderline cases, and because it's so clear and specific, it's an easy target: one court struck down the whole US version in 2025.

The second is the broad principle: forbid the unfair design itself, so it stretches to cover any new trick. But the price is fog — honest firms play it too safe, cunning ones dare you to sue, and the real meaning arrives one court case at a time. The third doesn't touch the exit at all: it changes what happens when you do nothing — auto-expire unless you choose to stay, or a clear "you're about to be billed" with a one-tap pause. The price is that it punishes the honest customer too, who now has to sign up again and again. None of these says subscriptions are bad. Each asks the same question: how do you make leaving as easy as joining, without punishing the people who want to stay?

So come back to that afternoon on hold, trying to leave something you joined in a single click. The headline will be about subscriptions and one country's new law. But underneath is something bigger, and it shows up in far more than streaming. Whenever it's effortless to say yes and strangely hard to say no, someone built that exit on purpose — because a market only keeps a company honest as long as you can actually leave, and friction is the quiet way to make sure you can't.

There are fair reasons to put a small step on the way out — to check it's really you, to make sure you meant it. But one step is not a maze, and asking you to confirm is not the same as trapping you. So the next time leaving is far harder than joining, the useful question isn't whether the service is good. It is this: who decided the way out should be harder than the way in — and when a rule tries to fix it, did they make it too specific to work, or too vague to mean anything?