When the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with Adobe last month over its subscription cancellation practices, the reaction in payments and software as a service circles was predictably split. 

Critics of regulatory overreach argued it was government meddling in private commercial relationships. Advocates for consumer protection cheered. I think the more important story isn't about compliance, but about what Adobe actually lost and it is likely worth a lot more than $150 million.

The question isn't whether government intervention in subscription cancellation policies is good or bad. The question is why so many companies still need to be told that burying your cancellation flow is a losing strategy.

A subscriber who can't find the cancel button, who gets routed through three retention screens, and then has to call someone and wait 45 minutes on the line, is a very frustrated user of the service. Frustrated users are determined to exit and when they finally do, they just don’t leave quietly. They tell their friends, write angry reviews and become the cautionary tale that makes your next prospect hesitate.

So, I do believe that the U.S. regulators got it right. 

Not because I think regulators are ideally positioned to design product experiences…they aren’t. But because the Adobe case illustrated something the subscription industry has been slow to confront: friction in cancellation is not a retention strategy. It's a trust tax, and eventually the bill comes due.

These consumers aren't making impulsive decisions but are constantly evaluating the value they derive. When you remove friction, when you make it genuinely easy for people to pause, downgrade or even cancel, trust goes up. And with trust comes loyalty.

When a subscriber knows they can leave anytime, then their decision to stay becomes meaningful. Every renewal becomes an active vote of confidence and can materially change how you think about your product roadmap even. When your subscribers can leave and choose not to, you have indeed built something real.

Government regulation, in this case, is filling a vacuum that the industry left open. 

The Federal Trade Commission's click-to-cancel rule, California's automatic renewal laws, and now the Adobe settlement are all signals pointing at the same underlying problem: some businesses bet that the cost of complexity was worth it, that consumers would tolerate opacity in the billing relationship. That bet is no longer paying off as regulators and consumers are both paying attention.

The Adobe case is a cautionary tale. But it's also an invitation: to build subscription experiences where no regulator would ever have reason to look twice, because subscribers are already choosing to stay.