Category: Tech News Feed

BANGKOK (AP) — Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang says the technology giant has won approval from the Trump administration to sell its advanced H20 computer chips used to develop artificial intelligence to China.

The news came in a company blog post late Monday, which stated that the U.S. government had “assured” Nvidia that licenses would be granted — and that the company “hopes to start deliveries soon.” Shares of the California-based chipmaker were up over 4% by midday Tuesday.

Huang also spoke about the coup on China’s state-run CGTN television network, in remarks shown on X.

“Today, I’m announcing that the U.S. government has approved for us filing licenses to start shipping H20s,” Huang told reporters in Beijing.

He added that half of the world’s AI researchers are in China. “It’s so innovative and dynamic here in China that it’s really important that American companies are able to compete and serve the market here,” he said.

Huang recently met with President Donald Trump and other U.S. policymakers — and is in Beijing this week to attend a supply chain conference and speak with Chinese officials. The broadcast showed Huang meeting with Ren Hongbin, the head of the China Council for Promotion of International Trade, host of the China International Supply Chain Expo, which Huang was attending. Nvidia is an exhibitor.

Nvidia has profited enormously from the rapid adoption of AI, becoming the first company to have its market value surpass $4 trillion last week. However, the trade rivalry between the U.S. and China has been weighing heavily on the industry.

Here’s what we know.

What is Nvidia’s H20 chip?

The H20 graphics processing unit, or GPU, is an advanced AI chip — a type of device used to build and update a range of AI systems. But it’s less powerful than Nvidia’s top semiconductors today.

That’s because the H20 chip was developed to specifically comply with U.S. restrictions for exports of AI chips to China. Nvidia’s most advanced chips, which carry more computing power, are off-limits to the Chinese market.

Washington has been tightening controls on exports of advanced technology to China for years, citing concerns that know-how meant for civilian use could be deployed for military purposes. And in January, before Trump began his second term in office, President Joe Biden’s administration launched a new framework for exporting advanced computer chips used to develop AI — in an attempt to balance national security concerns about the technology with the economic interests of producers and other countries.

Restrictions on sales of advanced chips to China have been central to the AI race between the world’s two largest economic powers, but such controls are also controversial. Proponents argue that these restrictions are necessary to slow China down enough to allow U.S. companies to keep their lead. Meanwhile, opponents say the export controls have loopholes — and could still spur innovation. The emergence of China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot in January particularly renewed concerns over how China might use advanced chips to help develop its own AI capabilities.

What’s happened since Trump took office?

In April, just months after Trump took office, the White House announced that it would restrict sales of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China — as well as MI308 chips from rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices.

At the time, the Trump administration again cited national security. But Nvidia said these tighter export controls would cost the company an extra $5.5 billion — and Huang and other technology leaders have been lobbying Trump to reverse the restrictions since. They’ve argued that such limits hinder U.S. competition in a sector in one of the world’s largest markets for technology, and have also warned that U.S. export controls could end up pushing other countries toward China’s AI technology.

Monday’s announcement from Nvidia signals that its lobbyingefforts paid off — although the Trump administration has yet to publicly comment on the future of H20 chip sales in China. And the exact timing remains unknown overall. It’s also unclear whether AMD will similarly see restrictions lifted for its MI308 chips. AMD didn’t immediately return an emailed request for comment Tuesday about how Trump’s policies would affect its chip sales in China.

On top of export controls, California-based Nvidia — like other tech giants today — has been caught in the crosshairs of Trump’s tariff wars abroad, particularly amid America’s tit-for-tat levies with China. But Nvidia and its CEO have garnered Trump’s favor in recent months. In April, the company announced that it would be producing its AI chips in the U.S. for the first time, starting with more than one million square feet of manufacturing space to build and test its specialized Blackwell chips in Arizona and AI supercomputers in Texas.

Trump was quick to applaud Nvidia’s move. He introduced Huang as a “smart cookie” who was helping bring jobs to the U.S. at an “Investing in America” event held at the White House later that month.

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Grantham-Philips reported from New York. AP Writers Didi Tang in Washington, D.C., Matt O’Brien in Providence, Rhode Island and AP researcher Yu Bing in Beijing contributed.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — President Donald Trump and Sen. David McCormick of Pennsylvania touted tens of billions of dollars of energy and technology investments Tuesday as the president traveled to Pittsburgh for a conference with dozens of top executives to promote his energy and technology agenda.

“This is a really triumphant day for the people of the commonwealth and the United States of America,” Trump said as he took the stage at the summit, held at Carnegie Mellon University.

The Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, held at the prestigious college, comes as the state’s political and business leaders are working to forge the city into a hub for robotics, artificial intelligence and energy.

Trump has repeatedly pledged U.S. “energy dominance” in the global market, and Pennsylvania — a swing state critical to his wins in 2016 and 2024 — is at the forefront of that agenda, in large part due to its coal and gas industry that the Republican administration has taken steps to bolster.

At the summit, Trump Cabinet officials spoke of the need to produce as much energy as possible — especially from coal and natural gas — to beat China in the artificial intelligence race for the sake of economic and national security.

“The AI revolution is upon us,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said during a panel discussion. “The Trump administration will not let us lose. We need to do clean, beautiful coal. We need to do natural gas, we need to embrace nuclear, we need to embrace it all because we have the power to do it and if we don’t do it we’re fools.”

Some of the investments on a list released by McCormick’s office were not necessarily brand new, while others were. Some involve massive data center projects, while others involve building power plants, expanding natural gas pipelines, upgrading power plants or improving electricity transmission networks.

Google said it would invest $25 billion on AI and data center infrastructure over the next two years in PJM’s mid-Atlantic electricity grid, while investment firm Brookfield said it had signed contracts to provide more than $3 billion of power to Google’s data centers from two hydroelectric dams on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.

Blackstone said it will spend $25 billion on data centers and power infrastructure in northeastern Pennsylvania, Frontier Group said it would transform the former Bruce Mansfield coal-fired power plant in western Pennsylvania into a new natural gas-fired plant and AI cloud computing firm CoreWeave said it will spend more than $6 billion to equip a data center in south central Pennsylvania.

McCormick, a first-term Republican senator who organized the inaugural event, said the summit was meant to bring together top energy companies and AI leaders, global investors and labor behind Trump’s energy policies and priorities.

The list of participating CEOs includes leaders from global behemoths like Blackstone, Bridgewater, SoftBank, Amazon Web Services, BlackRock and ExxonMobil and local companies such as the Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, which deploys AI to bolster energy capacity. Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, also spoke.

“What’s exciting about this event is it’s a great catalyst for investments and closing deals in the region,” said Jake Loosararian, the founder and CEO of Gecko Robotics.

Administration officials speaking at the summit included White House crypto czar David Sacks, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Lutnick. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also attended.

McCormick credited his wife, Dina Powell McCormick, with the idea for a summit. Powell McCormick served as Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term and is a former Goldman Sachs executive who is now at BDT & MSD Partners, a merchant bank.

Pittsburgh is home to Carnegie Mellon University, a prestigious engineering school, plus a growing industry of small robotics firms and a so-called “ AI Avenue ” that’s home to offices for Google and other AI firms. It also sits in the middle of the prolific Marcellus Shale natural gas reservoir.

“What’s going on is a rewiring of the economy, of the world over the next 15 years and that takes trillions and trillions and tens of trillions of dollars and it starts with power,” said Bruce Flatt, CEO of Brookfield, during a panel discussion.

Pennsylvania has scored big investment wins in recent months, some driven by federal manufacturing policy and others by the ravenous need for electricity from the fast-growing AI business.

Nippon Steel just bought U.S. Steel for almost $15 billion, getting Trump’s approval after pledging to invest billions alone in U.S. Steel’s Pittsburgh-area plants.

Amazon will spend $20 billion on two data center complexes in Pennsylvania, while the one-time Homer City coal-fired power plant is being turned into the nation’s largest gas-fired power plant to fuel a data center campus. Meanwhile, Microsoft says it is spending $1.6 billion to reopen the lone functional nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island under a long-term power supply agreement for its data centers.

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Levy reported from Harrisburg, Pa.

BANGKOK (AP) — Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang says the technology giant has won approval from the Trump administration to sell its advanced H20 computer chips used to develop artificial intelligence to China.

The news came in a company blog post late Monday and Huang also spoke about the coup on China’s state-run CGTN television network in remarks shown on X.

“The U.S. government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon,” the post said.

“Today, I’m announcing that the U.S. government has approved for us filing licenses to start shipping H20s,” Huang told reporters in Beijing. He noted that half of the world’s AI researchers are in China.

“It’s so innovative and dynamic here in China that it’s really important that American companies are able to compete and serve the market here in China,” he said.

Huang recently met with Trump and other U.S. policymakers and this week is in Beijing to attend a supply chain conference and speak with Chinese officials.

The broadcast showed Huang meeting with Ren Hongbin, the head of the China Council for Promotion of International Trade, host of the China International Supply Chain Expo, which Huang was attending. Nvidia is an exhibitor.

Nvidia has profited enormously from rapid adoption of AI, becoming the first company to have its market value surpass $4 trillion last week. However, the trade rivalry between the U.S. and China has been weighing heavily on the industry.

Washington has been tightening controls on exports of advanced technology to China for years, citing concerns that know-how meant for civilian use could be deployed for military purposes. The emergence of China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot in January renewed concerns over how China might use the advanced chips to help develop its own AI capabilities.

In January, before Trump began his second term in office, the administration of President Joe Biden launched a new framework for exporting advanced computer chips used to develop artificial intelligence, an attempt to balance national security concerns about the technology with the economic interests of producers and other countries.

The White House announced in April that it would restrict sales of Nvidia’s H20 chips and AMD’s MI308 chips to China.

Nvidia had said the tighter export controls would cost the company an extra $5.5 billion, and Huang and other technology leaders have been lobbying President Donald Trump to reverse the restrictions. They argue that such limits hinder U.S. competition in a leading edge sector in one of the world’s largest markets for technology.

They’ve also warned that U.S. export controls could end up pushing other countries toward China’s AI technology.

Nvidia’s U.S. traded shares jumped nearly 5% before the opening bell.

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AP researcher Yu Bing in Beijing contributed.

NEW YORK (AP) — Nextdoor, the social media site that aims to create connections among neighbors, is trying to shake off an uneven past and a nagging sense it is being underutilized. How? It is turning to professional journalists for help.

The company announced a partnership Tuesday with more than 3,500 local news providers who will regularly contribute material to the app. As part of a redesign, it is also expanding its ability to alert users about bad weather, power outages and other dangers, along with using AI to improve recommendations for restaurants, services and local points of interest.

“There should be enough value that we are creating for neighbors that they feel like they need to open up Nextdoor every single day,” said Nirav Tolia, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “And that isn’t the case today.”

The potential for Nextdoor to help itself and journalists at the same time is most intriguing.

Nextdoor is carrying portions of local news stories from providers in the area where the user lives. If people want to learn more, a link to the news site is included. At launch, Nextdoor says it has more than 50,000 news stories available, representing just over three-quarters of the app’s “neighborhoods.”

A future for news that never arrived

When Nextdoor began in 2011, the local news industry was in the early stages of a freefall that continues today. The number of journalists in the U.S. dropped from 40 per 100,000 residents in 2002 to slightly more than eight today, according to a study issued this month by Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News. Nearly a third of the nation’s counties have no full-time journalist.

Into this tumult came an app with a promising premise and infrastructure, perhaps a template for local news of the future. Its users — Nextdoor likes to call them “neighbors” — were organized into more than 200,000 distinct neighborhoods, with the ability to start conversations once shared over back fences: Do you know a reliable babysitter? What’s that building going up down the street? Who serves the best burger?

Yet Nextdoor’s developers knew technology, not the news business. They didn’t see a role for professional journalists at the outset.

“We thought in our early days that neighbors would take over, almost as citizen journalists or local reporters,” Tolia said. “I think we’ve come to the conclusion that neighbors can only do so much.”

Even worse, the site became a magnet for racists and cranks, the kind of neighbors you try to avoid. Nextdoor became so filled with suspicion — why is a person of a different color or nationality walking down the street? — that its moderators had to spend considerable time rooting out racist posts and changing rules to prevent them.

For some users, the negatives outweighed the positives.

“Nextdoor has been a valuable resource for my family,” Ralinda Harvey Smith, a woman from Santa Monica, Calif., wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2020. “I found a nanny share for my kids on Nextdoor. When I posted looking for a mechanic to replace my car headlight, a neighbor offered to change it free of charge. When the pandemic struck and disinfectant wipes were impossible to come by, a woman on Nextdoor DM’d me offering to leave some on her porch.”

“Yet I’ve long seen remnants of racism across the site that have left me with a bad feeling not only about the app, but the city I love,” Smith wrote. That made her log on less frequently.

Trying to make Nextdoor essential for users

Whatever the reasons, enough users consider Nextdoor inessential that its leaders were compelled to make the changes being announced now. The site has 100 million registered users, but only about 25 million are on the site at least once a week, Tolia said. Nextdoor, which went public in 2021 to attract a new round of financing, wants to see them more often.

Nextdoor hired a former executive at The New York Times, Georg Petschnigg, as its chief design officer to oversee the changes.

The company said its surveys found users wanted to know more about what was going on in their communities beyond the utilitarian information. Other social networks are similarly bringing in more outside material, Tolia said. “When you rely on user-generated content, it’s kind of unpredictable in terms of quality, timeliness and relevance,” he said.

“If I were in their shoes, I’d be doing this. I don’t know why they didn’t do it sooner, but that’s for them to answer and not me,” said Chuck Todd, the former “Meet the Press” moderator who has taken an interest in local news since leaving NBC. Semafor this spring speculated Todd might be interested in buying Nextdoor. Todd wouldn’t discuss that.

He is waiting to see if Nextdoor has a real commitment to news or just to reaching more eyeballs.

“It’s an opportunity to do the one thing that Facebook could have done but chose not to,” Todd said. “You don’t want this to go down the road of just trying to get traffic for traffic’s sake, because that’s what happened to Facebook after it went public.”

The irony of engaging with professional journalists isn’t lost.

“It’s like what is old is new again,” said Sam Cholke, manager of distribution and audience growth for the Institute for Nonprofit News. Its hundreds of members include the Texas Tribune, the Plateau Daily News in Highlands, N.C., and the Daily Yonder in Whitesburg, Kentucky.

Several of its participating news organizations are joining with Nextdoor, and “my hope is that our members see significant benefits from it,” Cholke said.

Hoping for mutually beneficial relationship

The local news industry continues to suffer from the same problems that have led to its downfall the past two decades: a dwindling number of readers and advertisers. An offhand comment by Tolia — about how people used to pick up “a piece of dead tree” from their driveways to get their news — speaks to fading prospects.

Facebook’s deemphasis of news on its platform and Google’s increasing use of AI at the expense of referrals to news articles are adding to the death spiral, said Tim Franklin, head of the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern.

“If Nextdoor is another vessel to get readers to news sites, and local news sites in particular, it would come at a real moment of vulnerability for local news organizations and would be a real opportunity,” said Franklin, whose worry is that relying on third parties is unpredictable.

Josh Schneps, who runs a series of local news operations in New York City and Long Island, like the Flushing Times and Park Slope Courier, has already had material appear on Nextdoor in a soft launch and is seeing an increase in traffic to the sites.

“I feel like media is in a state of evolution and there’s no playbook,” Schneps said. “My goal is to get our content in front of as many people as possible. I’m more than happy to be the guinea pig” for Nextdoor, he said.

An industry — and a company — both need help. Maybe they can help each other.

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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.

BANGKOK (AP) — Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang says the technology giant has won approval from the Trump administration to sell its advanced H20 computer chips used to develop artificial intelligence to China.

The news came in a company blog post late Monday and Huang also spoke about the coup on China’s state-run CGTN television network in remarks shown on X.

“The U.S. government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon,” the post said.

“Today, I’m announcing that the U.S. government has approved for us filing licenses to start shipping H20s,” Huang told reporters in Beijing. He noted that half of the world’s AI researchers are in China.

“It’s so innovative and dynamic here in China that it’s really important that American companies are able to compete and serve the market here in China,” he said.

Huang recently met with Trump and other U.S. policymakers and this week is in Beijing to attend a supply chain conference and speak with Chinese officials.

The broadcast showed Huang meeting with Ren Hongbin, the head of the China Council for Promotion of International Trade, host of the China International Supply Chain Expo, which Huang was attending. Nvidia is an exhibitor.

Nvidia has profited enormously from rapid adoption of AI, becoming the first company to have its market value surpass $4 trillion last week. However, the trade rivalry between the U.S. and China has been weighing heavily on the industry.

Washington has been tightening controls on exports of advanced technology to China for years, citing concerns that know-how meant for civilian use could be deployed for military purposes. The emergence of China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot in January renewed concerns over how China might use the advanced chips to help develop its own AI capabilities.

In January, before Trump began his second term in office, the administration of President Joe Biden launched a new framework for exporting advanced computer chips used to develop artificial intelligence, an attempt to balance national security concerns about the technology with the economic interests of producers and other countries.

The White House announced in April that it would restrict sales of Nvidia’s H20 chips and AMD’s MI308 chips to China.

Nvidia had said the tighter export controls would cost the company an extra $5.5 billion, and Huang and other technology leaders have been lobbying President Donald Trump to reverse the restrictions. They argue that such limits hinder U.S. competition in a leading edge sector in one of the world’s largest markets for technology.

They’ve also warned that U.S. export controls could end up pushing other countries toward China’s AI technology.

Nvidia’s U.S. traded shares slipped 0.5% in afterhours trading Monday, but its shares traded in Frankfurt, Germany, jumped 3.2% early Tuesday.

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AP researcher Yu Bing in Beijing contributed.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — President Donald Trump and Sen. David McCormick of Pennsylvania will jointly announce tens of billions of dollars of energy investments in the state Tuesday as the president travels to Pittsburgh for a conference with dozens of top executives to promote his energy and technology agenda.

The Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit is being held at Carnegie Mellon University, and it comes as the state’s political and business leaders are working to forge the city into a hub for robotics, artificial intelligence and energy.

Trump has repeatedly pledged U.S. “energy dominance” in the global market, and Pennsylvania — a swing state critical to his wins in 2016 and 2024 — is at the forefront of that agenda, in large part due to its coal industry that the Republican administration has taken several steps to bolster.

Neither the White House nor McCormick’s office gave breakdowns of the projects — McCormick put the figure at $90 billion total on Tuesday — or what the investments entail, although some hints began emerging Tuesday.

Investment firm Brookfield said it had signed contracts to provide more than $3 billion of power to Google from two hydroelectric dams on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. AI cloud computing firm CoreWeave said it will spend more than $6 billion to equip a data center in southcentral Pennsylvania. And Gradiant said it will begin commercial production of lithium in 2026 by extracting it from gas drilling wastewater in northeastern Pennsylvania.

McCormick, a Republican first-term senator who is organizing the inaugural event, says the summit is meant to bring together top energy companies and AI leaders, global investors and labor behind Trump’s energy policies and priorities.

“This summit is about catalyzing, among other things, $90 billion in investment and tens of thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania,” McCormick told attendees in his opening remarks at the conference.

The projects, McCormick said, are a realization of promises to “make America energy-dominant, lead in advanced technology and create jobs and opportunities for working families in Pennsylvania and across America.”

The list of participating CEOs includes leaders from global behemoths like Blackstone, Bridgewater, SoftBank, Amazon Web Services, BlackRock and ExxonMobil and local companies such as the Pittsburgh-based Gecko Robotics, which deploys AI to bolster energy capacity. Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, will also attend.

Administration officials speaking at the summit include White House crypto czar David Sacks, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also will attend, McCormick’s office said.

McCormick has credited his wife, Dina Powell McCormick, with the idea for a summit. Powell McCormick served as Trump’s deputy national security adviser in his first term and is a former Goldman Sachs executive who is now at BDT & MSD Partners, a merchant bank.

Pittsburgh is home to Carnegie Mellon University, a prestigious engineering school, plus a growing industry of small robotics firms and a so-called “ AI Avenue ” that’s home to offices for Google and other AI firms. It also sits in the middle of the prolific Marcellus Shale natural gas reservoir.

Pennsylvania has scored several big investment wins in recent months, some of it driven by federal manufacturing policy and others by the ravenous need for electricity from the fast-growing AI business.

Nippon Steel just bought U.S. Steel for almost $15 billion, getting Trump’s approval after pledging to invest billions alone in U.S. Steel’s Pittsburgh-area plants.

Amazon will spend $20 billion on two data center complexes in Pennsylvania, with more to come, while a one-time coal-fired power plant is being turned into the nation’s largest gas-fired power plant to fuel a data center campus. Meanwhile, Microsoft says it is spending $1.6 billion to reopen the lone functional nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island under a long-term power supply agreement for its data centers.

Shapiro, elected in 2022, has been pushing for the state to land a big multibillion-dollar industrial project, like a semiconductor factory or an electric vehicle plant.

In his first budget speech, Shapiro — who is viewed as a potential White House contender in 2028 — told lawmakers that Pennsylvania needs to “get in the game” and warned that it would take money.

He didn’t land a mega project, but he instead has worked to play up big investments by Amazon and Microsoft, as well as Nippon Steel, as he prepares to seek a second term.

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Levy reported from Harrisburg, Pa.

NEW YORK (AP) — A “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have made it easier for consumers to end unwanted subscriptions, has been blocked by a federal appeals court days before it was set to go into effect. But there are ways to end those subscriptions and memberships, even if they take some work.

The rule would also have required companies to disclose when free trials and promotional offers would end and let customers cancel recurring subscriptions as easily as they started them. But even without the new federal guidance, here are some ways to stay on top of subscription and membership fees.

Use calendar reminders and regularly review your bills

Experts at the Consumer Federation of America recommend setting calendar reminders for whenever a free trial period ends, to alert yourself to cancel promotional offers before the real recurring costs kick in. The auto-enrollment process, in which the company does not remind the consumer via email that a trial is about to end and higher monthly payments will begin, was also at the heart of the FTC’s rule.

“No subscription business model should be structured to profit from a gauntlet-style cancellation process,” said Erin Witte, Director of Consumer Protection for the Consumer Federation of America, in a statement on the click-to-cancel rule.

Regularly reviewing your credit card and debit card bills can also help you keep track of any recurring charges — including price increases you may have missed or that you didn’t anticipate when trying out a new membership or subscription.

Know the terms and conditions of a given subscription

“Companies make it easy for consumers to click to sign up and easy for the companies to automatically withdraw funds from consumers’ accounts,” said Shennan Kavanagh, Director of Litigation at the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) in a statement on the FTC’s click-to-cancel rule. “People should not (have to) spend months trying to cancel unwanted subscriptions.”

Given the FTC’s vacated rule, though, companies may still legally require that customers cancel memberships or subscriptions by phone, even as they permit signing up, enrolling, and paying bills online. Consumer advocates say this places an extra burden of time and energy on the consumer to stop an unwanted recurring fee, but sometimes knowing the terms of the subscription and getting on the phone is worth the trouble.

There are some services that unenroll you

Apps like Rocket Money and services like Trim, which is accessed through a browser, can keep track of your recurring monthly fees and subscriptions, for free — or for a fee — and can help you catch new ones or even unsubscribe from some services.

For parents, especially, a service like Trim could help inform them that a child has started a new subscription, game or membership before the fees recur. And Rocket Money will actively work to end unwanted subscriptions for you, for a monthly price. If the company can’t successfully end or cancel the subscription or membership, it will give the customer the information needed to do so. Trim also provides this service, in its premium form, for an additional fee.

Resist deals when canceling

The FTC is currently moving forward with preparations for a trial involving Amazon’s Prime program, which accuses the retailer of enrolling consumers in its Prime program without their consent and making it difficult to cancel subscriptions.

Often, when a consumer tries to cancel a subscription for something like Prime, which offers free delivery and streaming video, the company will offer a month or more of the subscription at a promotional rate — half off, or at other, better-seeming values, to entice a customer to stay. Staying strong in the face of what may appear to be a good deal can help you stop recurring monthly fees before you forget to cancel them again.

Agreeing to yet another trial or promotional rate, which is another on-ramp to auto-enrollment, just continues the cycle, according to consumer advocates.

What would the FTC’s rule have done?

The FTC’s rule would have required businesses to obtain a customer’s consent before charging for memberships, auto-renewals and programs linked to free trials. The businesses would have also had to disclose when free trials and promotional offers would end.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said this week that the FTC made a procedural error by failing to come up with a preliminary regulatory analysis, which is required for rules whose annual impact on the U.S. economy is more than $100 million.

The FTC said that it did not have to come up with a preliminary regulatory analysis because it initially determined that the rule’s impact on the national economy would be less than $100 million. An administrative law judge decided that the economic impact would be more than the $100 million threshold, and the court decided to vacate the rule.

Former President Joe Biden’s administration had included the FTC’s proposal as part of its “Time is Money” initiative, which aimed to crack down on consumer-related hassles.

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The Associated Press receives support from Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.