Signing up is one tap because they want your money now. Canceling has extra pages because they want your money later. That isn’t a philosophy of careful decisions. That’s a hose with a valve only they control. Accident is a tiny problem. They already know how to solve it. One confirm screen — “Cancel plan? You keep access until the 20th.” — stops almost every misclick. That is equal-easy plus a seatbelt. What he wants is the maze: call this number, wait on hold, “talk to a specialist,” ignore the first button, offer 50% off if you stay. That does not prevent accidents. It prevents exits. If friction is so wise, put it on the way in. Make signup a 20-minute call. Make people read the full price including the year-two jump. Make them wait for a “retention specialist” before the card is charged. He will never argue for that, because impulse is profitable and reflection is not. The second friction is only sacred when you try to leave, you know it isn’t about mistakes. “They might still want it” is the company appointing itself your parent. People cancel on purpose: broke, unused, switching, got billed twice. The seller does not get a veto because maybe you’ll miss the app. You can resubscribe in the same one click it took to join. Easy in and easy out is how you know the product is actually wanted, not just hard to bury. Hard cancel is not a safety feature. It is a dark pattern. Hide the link, split the flow, use guilt copy, make the button say “pause” when you meant “stop charging me.” That is designed confusion. Designed confusion is not prudence. So his rule is: joining should be a reflex, leaving should be a project. That’s not protecting subscribers. That’s protecting the charge that hits when they forget. Cancel should be the same door you walked in — same place in the account, same number of steps, same device, no human hostage-taker. A single “are you sure?” is fine. A gauntlet is a confession.

You’re not worried about accidents. You’re worried about exits. If a misclick were the issue, you’d put one confirmation on the same page as the subscribe button: “Stop billing. Access until the date already paid.” That’s equal effort plus a guardrail. You didn’t argue for that. You argued that leaving should take more work than joining. That’s the whole tell. Signup is built for impulse because impulse is your business model. You strip every extra field, save the card, start the trial in one tap. Then, when the customer uses the same brain to leave, you suddenly discover the virtues of slowness. Friction is only “careful” when it keeps the charge running. People don’t need you to save them from canceling something they still want. They can resubscribe with the same one-tap flow you already built. What they cannot do, under your rule, is escape a plan they don’t use without performing extra labor you never required to take their money. So don’t dress this up as safety. Safety is a confirm box. Your version is a second product: the cancel obstacle. If the subscription is good, easy cancel doesn’t kill it. If easy cancel kills it, the subscription was never being chosen. It was being endured.

You just gave up the real fight and tried to hide in a model. You admitted a confirm box is enough and the phone-tree gauntlet should be banned. That is cancel as easy as signup, plus one extra tap you already said is fine. The rest of your speech is a prediction that companies will spite their own signup funnel to spite the rule. They won’t. They already treat signup friction like poison. They A/B test the extra field off the page because every extra second costs them a customer. A law that says “leaving can’t be harder than joining” does not force them to add a hold screen. It lets them keep both doors at one tap and a confirm. That is the cheap equilibrium. Your “they can only reallocate a fixed pile of friction” line is invented. There is no friction budget. There is a cap: cancel ≤ signup. They can set both to easy. The firm that responds by making joining miserable loses the customer to the firm that doesn’t. Competition still exists. What dies is the strategy you were defending an hour ago: easy in, sticky out. If a company can only survive by trapping people who would have left, that company is not “protecting subscribers from mistakes.” It is billing people who were trying to leave. And the “subscribers end up worse off” story only works if you pretend the current extra pain on the way out is a gift. It isn’t. It’s an unadvertised price: time, hold music, forgotten charges. Easy cancel doesn’t make people worse off. It makes the price of the product the price on the button. You wanted a rule against dark patterns. Symmetry is that rule in one line. If signup is one tap, cancel is one tap and “are you sure.” If they choose to make signup a chore, that’s on them — and the market will punish it the same way it already punishes a long checkout. Don’t threaten a fictional hold screen to save a real trap.

You’re counting the wrong people and inventing a friction piggy bank that does not exist. There is still no fixed pile of friction they have to shove somewhere. They can keep the one-tap trial and a one-tap cancel. They already know how. The only reason they don’t is the second tap costs them recurring revenue. Your “equilibrium” is not physics. It is a threat: give us the trap or we’ll make joining ugly. A company that would rather wreck its own signup than let people leave is telling you what the product is worth. The “majority who never cancel” line treats inertia like consent. A lot of those people didn’t choose to stay. They forgot, they couldn’t find the button, they got tired of the maze you just said you’d ban. You don’t get to call that group a happy majority and then tax the people who try to leave so the silent charges keep flowing. And cancelers are not some tiny protected class. Subscriptions live on churn. If only a few people wanted out, you wouldn’t need a theory about raising the entry bar. You need that theory because easy exit hits the business. Asymmetric payoffs do not justify an asymmetric door. The company already has the advantage: they store the card, they pick the date, they write the mail, they design the page. The customer gets one tool — the cancel button. Making that button harder than subscribe is how the strong side uses the weak side’s time as extra profit. You already conceded the gauntlet and the guilt copy. What’s left of your case is “please let joining stay impulsive and leaving stay a little worse, for the people who don’t leave.” That’s not fairness. That’s a discount for the firm, paid in other people’s unused months. One tap in. Confirm. One tap out. If the trial can’t survive that, it was never a trial. It was a snare with a welcome email.

You changed the meaning of “as easy as” into “as long as the checkout form,” then declared victory. Signup asks for an address, tax, and a card because they don’t have you yet. Cancel happens inside an account they already built. Matching ease does not mean re-typing the checkout. It means the same device, the same login, no new homework, no extra human, no extra hunt. If a firm pads the exit with fake verification to “match” the entry form, that’s not symmetry. That’s cheating the rule, and it’s the same dark pattern with a ruler. The rule is a ceiling on how hard leaving can be: not harder than joining. It is not a floor that forces extra taps. Firms can — and honest ones do — make cancel easier than signup: you’re already identified. Your story only works if you assume they will be as petty as the law allows. That’s an argument for writing the rule as “cancel in two clicks from the account page,” not for keeping the door heavier on purpose. Competition does not cut your way. The market already races to the bottom on signup friction. It does not race to the bottom on cancel friction, because the customer is already captured. That’s why you need the law on the way out and not the way in. You’re pointing at the competitive door and pretending it proves the uncompetitive door is fine. Auto-renewal is a real issue. It is not a replacement issue. You can require clear prices, a visible end date, and a cancel button that actually works. “Regulate the dollar and the disclosure” while the button is still buried is how we got “cancel anytime” in the ad and a maze in the account. Disclosure without an easy exit is a slogan taped to a trap. You already banned the gauntlet. Good. What’s left is whether the remaining extra steps are there to prevent a misclick — one confirm — or there to save the charge. If they exist only because checkout had fields, you’re not protecting anyone. You’re photocopying paperwork onto the way out so the month can keep billing.