One approval, standing in for every future instance
Standing consent is agreement given once, at a single point in time, that continues to authorize a recurring action — a repeated charge, an ongoing data feed — indefinitely afterward, until the person who gave it explicitly withdraws it. This is meaningfully different from ordinary consent to a single, one-time action: the original approval is separated from every action it goes on to authorize by potentially a long span of time, during which the person granting it isn't individually reviewing or re-approving any of the subsequent instances.
Because of that separation, standing consent depends heavily on the person genuinely understanding, at the exact moment they grant it, that they're authorizing an ongoing pattern rather than a single event — a distinction that's easy to present unclearly, deliberately or not, at the moment of signup.
Revocability is what keeps a standing grant from becoming permanent
A standing grant that's difficult to find, difficult to understand, or difficult to actually withdraw functions, in practice, much closer to a permanent one than a genuinely revocable one — the theoretical ability to cancel means little if the actual path to doing so is buried or deliberately obstructed. Making withdrawal at least as easy and discoverable as the original grant was is what keeps standing consent meaningfully different from an irrevocable, indefinite authorization in practice, not merely in the fine print.