The man who just got handed New York City’s consumer protection department is Samuel Levine, the lawyer who spent the last four years getting billions back from companies that rip people off, and his first complaint about New Yorkers is a beautiful thing: they don’t complain enough. He told the Guardian this week that his office gets about 30,000 complaints a year, and that he’d “really like to get the number up.” Most public servants try to suppress the complaint count. Levine is on the record inviting it — because the complaints are the lever, and he spent four years proving the lever works.
Subscription traps, not a few bad bosses, are mining New York’s wallets. That is the reality, and Levine is trying to fight it with a rubber stamp. He is launching an aggressive campaign against junk fees, suing self-storage firms and Uber Eats, and rolling out a “click to cancel” rule. He argues that an epidemic of corporate deception is draining residents through A/B tested subscription tricks and hidden charges, and that the city must enforce consequences where federal regulators have failed. He is right to fight it. But a municipal cop playing whack-a-mole with hidden fees isn’t the cure. It is the symptom of a market that stopped making money by building good things a long time ago.
I’ll concede the part the critics will reach for first. Levine is a regulator, and regulators can be captured, overbearing, or wrong. The Chamber of Commerce objection to click-to-cancel wasn’t fabricated from nothing — compliance costs money, and some of that cost will land on businesses that weren’t the target. Fine. That’s the honest concern. But that is a compliance cost, not a license fee for deception. The Chamber’s objection to frictionless cancellation proves they understand the economics of the trap better than they admit.
Now: every one of those concerns already applies to the thing Levine is regulating. The subscription economy is overbearing. The digital interface is captured — by the company that designs it to make cancellation deliberately harder than enrollment, using A/B testing to find exactly which friction points make you give up. As Levine put it, “capitalism really works fabulously when it comes to creating a seamless enrollment experience. You just go on a website and they’ll get you enrolled in 30 seconds, it’s incredible! And then suddenly when you want to cancel, they use dark patterns and other design tricks to generate deliberate friction. It’s deeply manipulative.”
That’s not an accusation. That’s a design spec. The company could make cancellation one click. It chose not to, because the friction is worth billions. The market didn’t punish that choice — competition in subscriptions is mostly about who’s better at hiding the exit — so the market isn’t going to fix it. That’s the suppressed variable in every free-market critique of consumer protection: the market is rigged at the interface level, by design, and the riggers are very good at it. When a firm’s valuation depends on recurring monthly revenue, the easiest dial to turn isn’t product quality; it’s the cancellation flow. Venture capital demands growth. The market rewards the companies that use A/B-tested digital friction to lock in lifetime value. The design tricks Levine is fighting aren’t rogue experiments; they are the optimal legal strategy for an asset-light firm trying to hit its quarterly targets.
The cost is pushed onto your wallet, in five-dollar increments you are supposed to be too busy to notice. Levine admits he will happily spend three hours fighting for five bucks just on principle. The tragedy is that the average person working a double shift doesn’t have three hours. The Federal Trade Commission’s national click-to-cancel rule already got struck down on procedural grounds, not on the merits — the court didn’t question that trapping people in subscriptions is unfair and deceptive. Levine’s New York version, expected in June, would make the city the first municipality in the country with its own click-to-cancel law, on solid legal ground: the city can prohibit “deceptive or unconscionable” practices, and the rulemaking asserts that subscription traps are both.
Levine’s approach is in one sense radical — he’s the first city-level consumer watchdog acting with the muscle of a state attorney general — and in another sense it’s just the oldest American regulatory story there is. Regulatory muscle has been dormant since the Reagan-era shift to voluntary compliance because the country stopped treating corporate lawbreaking as a beat to patrol. You need a cop on the beat. Levine is that cop, and Mayor Mamdani’s early policy blitz suggests the mayor is serious about backing him.
The question underneath the question is whether you believe a functioning government can protect people from getting nickel-and-dimed by companies that optimized for it. The people who insist it can’t have a lot of evidence on their side — decades of underfunded, captured, or simply absent enforcement. Levine’s counterargument is simpler: he did it already. The hotel junk-fee rule is already the strongest in the nation, and it applies not just to hotels in New York but to any hotel advertising to New Yorkers. Uber Eats and Amazon have already written checks. The Dunkin’ Donuts franchisee settled for $1.8 million over worker violations, and Levine has the New York Post’s mocking coverage framed on his wall. He’s not hiding from the mockery; he’s using it as decor.
That’s what a confident regulator looks like — someone who took the shots, won the cases, and kept going. It shouldn’t be remarkable. It is, because we spent forty years being told that the alternative to the strip-mine was the gulag, and that anything between them — a government that answers the phone, a commissioner who takes the $5 complaint personally, a rule that says “make it one click to leave, same as it was one click to join” — was radical. It isn’t radical. It’s the boring thing a competent city does. It just hasn’t been done in a while, so it looks like a revolution.
But recognize the ceiling here. We are treating this like a moral failing of a few rogue bosses who need a scolding from a consumer cop. Levine is honest work, and absolutely necessary. But the city is still treating the people who live and work here as a revenue stream to be mined. Levine points out that the city now has to pay a hundred dollars a year just to keep Microsoft Word running. That is the tollbooth economy in its purest form. A city that left essential services — software, broadband, the grocery aisle — to extractive monopolies, and then acted surprised when the monopolies extracted.
So what gets built instead of another 311 complaint line?
First, we stop treating consumer protection as a boutique municipal effort playing catch-up. In the Nordic model, aggressive consumer safeguards aren’t left to a single commissioner begging citizens to file tickets; they are baked into universal standards and enforced by a state with actual administrative power. If a company builds a trap door, it shouldn’t face a negotiable civil penalty. It should lose its license to do business in the city, the same way a corner diner loses its health permit for leaving the walk-in refrigerator open. The city would condition operating permits on fair-practice compliance, and for platforms without a storefront, tie market access to city contracts and digital advertising privileges. No loopholes for digital landlords.
Second, we need ownership alternatives. Imagine if the software a public office needs was owned by a worker cooperative, not a monopolist mining the municipal budget. Or if the city’s broadband network operated like the rural electric co-ops that wired half the American countryside — a member-owned utility that doesn’t need a “click to cancel” button, because it doesn’t trap its own members to hit a quarterly dividend. Transitioning won’t be a straight line — the city would need to pair cooperative ownership with aggressive antitrust enforcement and public investment in open-source alternatives, because waiting for monopolies to voluntarily surrender their chokeholds is a fool’s errand. But the destination is worth the path. Keep the money in town. Let the users own the pipes.
I’m not anti-market. I’m anti-extraction. There is a Grand Canyon between selling a person a good product at a fair price, and building a digital cage to nickel-and-dime them until they forget the combination. Levine is welding one trap door shut, and I will take the win. But his framed New York Post mockery, his honest three-hour fights over five bucks, his invitation to send more complaints — all of that is a symptom of a city that has outsourced the answer to the question. The answer isn’t a better complaints department. The answer is a city that builds public infrastructure its residents already own, already pay for, and don’t need to call anyone to keep.