I once had a paper/digital subscription, and at some point I had cancelled the card linked to it. Unbeknownst to me (my parents were receiving the subscription), they had kept sending the paper despite the card being cancelled. When NYT eventually realized the card had been cancelled, they claimed that I owed them for the ~year or so that I had been receiving the paper after the card was cancelled, and attempted to send this to collections.
Completely outrageous business practices if you ask me.
Those are not universal terms, and are actually defined in the contract which you seem to have not read. Grace periods, minimum commitments, subscription lengths, and/or post-paid terms are all common.
Ironically there are far more complaints about cloud providers shutting down entire business operations because of a late payment here on HN. Perhaps you should consider this more thoroughly instead of escalating a single unfortunate anecdote into a strawman argument against how business billing works.
I'm not sure why is this outrageous. You had a contract with NYT so they deliver you the newspaper for a payment, contract which you didn't even try to cancel. This is how contracts work.
Completely outrageous business practices if you ask me.