Automatic subscription renewals take fire from Chinese state media despite being an important feature of the app economy

If you’ve ever forgotten to cancel an online subscription, you probably know the feeling of being locked into another month of a service you don’t want. Many people write this off as a cost of the digital economy. But for China’s state-run news outlet People’s Daily, auto-renewing subscriptions are a scourge that must be stopped.

In a commentary published on Tuesday, the outlet blasted Chinese app makers for automatically renewing users’ subscriptions. The practice is a “trap” for consumers and needs to be more strongly regulated, the piece argues.

Auto-renewals are common for subscription services these days. Whether you watch movies on Netflix or listen to music on Spotify, automatic payments are what keep you from going to each service you use to manually make a payment every month.

But it’s also easy for those subscriptions to pile up and for people to lose track of what they’re paying for online. People’s Daily argued that services take advantage of this by using introductory prices for the first month that are tied to future automatic payments.

“These auto-renewal tricks may appear smart, but they only think they’re being smart,” People’s Daily said.

Another obstacle, according to the article, is that some apps add extra steps to the cancellation process, making it difficult to end the payments. Many people online agree. Q&A site Zhihu is full of questions asking how to cancel subscriptions for a wide range of apps. Some people also chimed in on the People’s Daily post about the article on microblogging site Weibo.

“The thing is, if I want to cancel [a subscription], I’ll have to ask Baidu,” one Weibo user commented, referencing China’s biggest search engine. “Otherwise I wouldn’t know how.”