There should be a law that whenever this happens, the changes must be highlighted in bold.
As if anybody’s going to read the legalese.
They’re all switching to force arbitration, right?
Yup. Can’t have those consumers be having any actual rights now.
Did something happen to prompt this that I missed? Seems pretty sudden that everyone is switching TOS all at once, but I havent been able to figure out what kicked off the trend.
I don’t think it’s particularly new in general (see this article about forced arbitration for employment dated 2019), we’re just seeing it expand to tech services because they think they can get away with it.
Benefits for corporations:
- cheaper and faster than courts (esp. if you sign away right to class action lawsuits)
- lower instances of payout
- can change terms after sale
Negatives for corporations:
- people may move to a competitor with better terms
The reason they didn’t do it before is because people had more options. But once enough companies do it, everyone else feels like they can get away with it. The only real way for customers to fight back is to switch, but companies are finding that people generally just accept the forced arbitration agreement because it’s easier.
So I’m guessing we’re hitting some critical mass where more and more companies find they can get away with it.
I think the question is why do we seem to be seeing it everywhere all of a sudden. It is an old shitty practice but Roku kicked it off recently and seems like we see a bunch of others for some reason.
Getting shafted by corporations all the time feels like this …
EU citizens:
But seriously, it’s god damn shitty behaviour through and through. I’m sorry, Americans.
What’s that supposed to mean?
Forced arbitration is not applicable in the EU. ToS in general have a “nobody reads them” attitude, though that’s not very relevant to this discussion.
No, what does the image mean?
Relaxing while dreaming about relaxing.
To be honest I’m just praying your regulators make laws so draconian that it ripples over here and improves things indirectly. That seems to be all we can hope for anymore. 😔
Haha well at least we gave the world some cookie banners.
Yeah, and they’re incredibly annoying… But maybe it’s for the best.
Tbf the law doesn’t even mention cookie banners. The industry has just chosen, feely, that this is the way that they want to inform and collect consent. There’s nothing forcing them into doing so in such an intrusive way.
Yeah, ideally all of those would be opt-in and hidden is settings somewhere. But no, they wanted it to be opt-out so clueless people will just click through whatever the default is.
You can pray all you want. They will alter the deal. Enshittification never stops.