The U.S. Department of Justice today sued Adobe Inc. for allegedly making it unnecessarily difficult to unsubscribe from its software products.

In addition to the company, the complaint names executives David Wadhwani and Maninder Sawhney as defendants. Wadhwani is the president of Adobe’s digital media business, which includes its creative applications. Sawhney is the president of digital go-to-market and sales.

The Justice Department brought the lawsuit following a referral from the Federal Trade Commission. According to the complaint, the FTC found that Adobe had breached a 2010 piece of legislation called the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act. The company is believed to have done so by making it too complicated and expensive for consumers to cancel subscriptions to its applications.

At the center of the lawsuit is an Adobe pricing tier known as Annual, Paid Monthly. It provides a one-year subscription to the Adobe product selected by the customer, but is charged monthly rather than yearly. According to the FTC, Adobe often pre-selects the Annual, Paid Monthly option in its e-commerce checkout pages.

Consumers who purchase such a subscription and decide to cancel must pay an early termination fee. This fee, which only applies after 14 days and in the first year of a subscription, amounts to half the value of the customer’s outstanding monthly payments. The FTC is accusing Adobe of hiding this termination fee in small print and pop-up tooltips.

In the company’s checkout page, the interface panel for the Annual, Paid Monthly option includes a text snippet that reads “Fee applies if you cancel after 14 days.” The FTC determined that this text is displayed in a smaller font than the price of the subscription. 

Consumers can access more detailed information about the termination fee by hovering over a toolkit icon next to the disclosure. According to the Justice Department, the tooltip uses an even smaller font that the first text snippet. Moreover, the lawsuit charges that consumers who read the tooltip are “still not given concrete information about” the size of the termination fee, how it’s calculated and the product to which it applies.

The second section of the lawsuit focuses on the usability of Adobe’s subscription cancellation interface. According to the Justice Department, users must sometimes navigate through two settings panels on the company’s website to reach the “cancel your plan” button. Moreover, clicking the bottom doesn’t immediately unsubscribe users from the product they purchased. 

“Adobe has forced them to undergo a convoluted process requiring several additional steps, some of which were wholly unnecessary to complete cancellation,” the Justice Department stated.

The lawsuit also takes issue with Adobe’s customer support operations. According to the lawsuit, users must sometimes ask to cancel a subscription multiple times before the request is fulfilled. Moreover, such requests aren’t always processed correctly.

“In numerous instances, subscribers who have requested to cancel through Adobe’s customer service believe they have successfully cancelled but continue to be charged,” the lawsuit charges. “Some of these subscribers do not realize for months that Adobe is continuing to charge them, and only learn about the charges when they review their financial accounts.”

The Justice Department is asking the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to impose fines over Adobe’s subscription cancelation practices. Additionally, officials are seeking an injunction that will require the company to change the policies in question.

Photo: Adobe