The next stage in enshittification: Adobe
The FTC’s just went after another big tech company.
A few days ago, the FTC and DOJ sued Adobe and two executives for “Hiding Fees, Preventing Consumers from Easily Cancelling Software Subscriptions”.
The complaint surrounds Adobe’s “annual paid monthly” subscription pricing plan option. This option, which is set as the default, heavily advertises the plan’s “monthly” cost on Adobe’s website. Yet the FTC alleges that Adobe buries the early termination fee (ETF), which is 50% of the remaining monthly payments after a consumer has cancelled (and can potentially cost hundreds of dollars). The ETF disclosures are simply “buried on the company’s website in small print” or “small icons”.
Moreover, the FTC alleges that Adobe’s cancellation processes are deliberately complex, requiring consumers to navigate numerous pages. When consumers reach out to customer service, they encounter resistance from representatives, dropped calls and chats, and multiple transfers. Some consumers who thought their plans were successfully cancelled even reported that their credit card statements revealed that Adobe continued to charge them.
Such a practice — where signing up for a service is easy but cancelling is difficult — definitely isn’t exclusive to Adobe. In fact, it even has its own name: a “roach motel”, inspired from an American brand of cockroach-catching products where it’s easy to enter but impossible to exit.
Naturally, Adobe published a statement responding to the FTC. In it, they outlined the merits of SASS, and defended their services’ ease of cancellation. According to the statement, “Adobe’s cancellation flow today is just a four-step process that you can click through in less than a minute.”
This article isn’t supposed to be a blanket criticism of Adobe. I don’t profess to be a graphic designer by any means, and I have never been a paid customer of Adobe. Yet anecdotally, there’s a sentiment among many graphic designers that Adobe has had this coming for a long time. Customers have a laundry list of criticisms for the company, surrounding the high cancellation fee, poor UI design, and lack of improvements and bug fixes in recent years. This has been going on for a long time: as far back as 2012, two of Adobe’s products were listed as among the “The 10 most hated programs of all time” by TechRadar.
Adobe can do this because of its de facto monopoly status over the graphics and design software market. For graphic software specifically, it owns the top three products — Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator — for a combined 80% of the market.
Adobe has no clear competitor, either with the same breadth of services or depth of penetration across its industries. For the few companies that have the seeming potential to be Adobe’s competitor in the future, Adobe has tried acquiring them. Late last year, Adobe agreed with Figma on a $20 billion acquisition deal, before terminating it due to regulatory opposition from the Department of Justice, European Commission, and the UK Competition and Markets Authority.
At this point, it’s important to note that monopolies are technically legal, under certain conditions. The FTC permits monopolies obtained through “superior products, innovation, or business acumen”. And for a long time, Adobe did have superior and innovative products. Photoshop, for example, is considered by many graphic designers as a revolutionary tool for editing images, and many photographers, designers, and artists will concede that they owe much of their career to the program.
Not anymore. In many ways, Adobe’s fall reflects the enshittification of platforms. For the unfamiliar, the term was coined by Cory Doctorow in late 2022, who defined it as follows:
HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.
Doctorow uses the term primarily to criticise digital social media platforms like Facebook, or middlemen transaction platforms like Amazon and Uber.
Yet it can be expanded to Adobe as well. In many ways, the “roach motel” is simply the last leg of the enshittification process: abusing customers just as they are about to leave the platform.
I don’t mean to criticise the SASS model as a whole. I think it’s a great one with a lot of merit. In many cases, they provide convenience, flexibility, lower upfront costs, and allow customers to enjoy continuous updates at no extra cost in an industry where rapid progress is the norm.
Yet the rapid growth of the SASS industry has overseen many dark patterns emerge, such as the “roach motel”.
The FTC has been trying to cut down on more of such practices, and has proposed a set of reforms to do so. These reforms seek to revise the 1973 Negative Option Rule. (A negative option subscription is just a fancy term for a business model where companies continuously enrol customers in a subscription, unless they explicitly cancel it.)
One reform mandates that businesses must make cancelling a subscription at least as easy as starting it. For example, if it takes three steps to sign up for a subscription online, cancelling the same subscription cannot take more than three steps.
Separately, another reform requires companies to provide annual reminders to consumers before their subscription plans are renewed, so that they can remember to cancel their subscription in case they’ve forgotten about it.
These are steps in the right direction. But the FTC’s proposed reforms have faced heavy industry-wide criticism, over concerns that they expand the definition of negative options and give the FTC worrying levels of powers.
As with all legislation, some of this concern is valid, some of it not. I won’t be debating the nuances of this, but regardless, it’s clear that some level of reform is needed. And until then, expect to see ‘roach motels” swarming around on the internet.
