In ongoing litigation against Uber, the FTC recently escalated its case by adding a civil penalty claim and 21 state co-plaintiffs to a complaint alleging, in part, that Uber's UberOne membership program is unlawfully difficult for consumers to cancel — a significant expansion of a case that began as a federal-only action.DOCUMENTED
- The FTC's litigation against Uber includes allegations that UberOne, the company's paid membership program, does not provide the simple cancellation mechanism required under the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act (ROSCA).
- Twenty-one states joined the federal case as co-plaintiffs, and the FTC added a civil penalty claim to the existing complaint.
- This step follows separate FTC actions against the operator of the LA Fitness chain and an education technology provider, both of which the agency has cited as involving similarly difficult subscription-cancellation processes.
- The case is consistent with a broader FTC enforcement wave targeting negative-option and subscription businesses, including its 2025 settlement with Amazon over Prime membership enrollment and cancellation.
Why 21 states joining matters
A state attorney general joining a federal case as a co-plaintiff is not a purely symbolic move — it typically means that state's residents have generated a sufficient volume of complaints, or that the state's own consumer-protection statute independently supports comparable claims, to justify committing its own legal resources to the litigation. Twenty-one states doing so simultaneously against a single company's single subscription product suggests the underlying cancellation-friction complaints were geographically widespread rather than concentrated in any particular region.REVIEWED
Part of a broader subscription-enforcement wave
This case sits within a much larger current of 2025-2026 FTC activity targeting negative-option and subscription businesses across numerous unrelated industries — grocery delivery, digital photo licensing, tutoring services, and now rideshare membership programs. The common legal theory across these cases is ROSCA's "simple mechanism" requirement: a cancellation process must be at least as easy as the enrollment process was, and a complex, multi-step, or hard-to-find cancellation flow can itself constitute the violation, independent of whether any single disclosure along the way was technically false.DOCUMENTED
Sources behind this report
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