YouTube Automatic Renewal Subscriptions Violate Oregon ARL Class Action

Google, LLC, doing business as YouTube, and YouTube, LLC are the defendants in this Oregon class action about automatic renewals. The complaint alleges that the companies have subjected consumers to an illegal automatic renewal subscription plan for special YouTube content and services. The complaint alleges that the auto renewals violate Oregon’s Automatic Renewal Law (ARL).

The class for this action is all persons in Oregon who, from the beginning of the applicable statute of limitations period through the date of final judgement in this case, incurred fees for YouTube TV, YouTube Music, or YouTube Premium subscription offerings.

YouTube offers a number of paid subscription-based membership plans (YT subscriptions) on its platform, including YouTube TV, YouTube Music, and YouTube Premium. YouTube TV offers exclusive content, special channels, and movies on registered devices. YouTube Music offers music streaming without advertisements. YouTube Premium offers ad-free access to all YouTube content and special content commissioned from certain YouTube personalities.

The complaint alleges that when consumers sign up for any of these subscriptions, they must provide their billing information, and then they are actually enrolled in autorenewal programs that keep charging their payment methods on either a month-to-month or a year-to-year basis without their consent. According to the complaint, YouTube is “relying on consumer confusion and inertia to retain customers, combat consumer churn, and bolster its revenues.”

The complaint alleges that the companies do this to consumers in Oregon as well, without fulfilling the requirements of the state’s ARL. The ARL requires that online sellers who offer automatically renewing subscriptions must do several things:

• They must provide the complete terms of the offer, “in a clear and conspicuous manner … and in visual proximity” to the request for consent before the consumer signs up.
• They must get the consumer’s “affirmative consent to the agreement” before they can charge the consumer’s payment method.
• They must give the consumer an acknowledgement that includes the offer terms and what the complaint calls “a cost-effective, timely and easy-to-use mechanism for cancellation” of the subscription.

The complaint alleges that the process for enrollment in a YT subscription violates each of these requirements.

In particular, the complaint alleges, the companies “make it exceedingly difficult and unnecessarily confusing for consumers to cancel their YT Subscriptions” and even use “dark patterns,” or deliberately tricky user interfaces designed to make consumers do what they do not intend to do or prevent them from doing what they do want to do.

According to the complaint, both of the plaintiffs in this case, Victor Walkingeagle and Nathan Briggs, had difficulty canceling their subscriptions.

Walkingeagle, the complaint alleges, “has been unable to cancel his YT Subscription due to [the companies’] confusing cancellation policy, the most crucial aspects of which were missing from the Checkout Page and the Acknowledgement Email” and is still subscribed. Briggs, the complaint says, also had difficulty in cancelling the subscription and “was only able to affect cancellation … by altogether cancelling his debit card through his bank.”

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Consumer
Tags: Automatic Subscription Renewal or Continuous Service Agreement, Deceptive Advertising