People need to know what they’re signing. Imagine if a celebrity was signing a bunch of autographs for fans, and someone surreptitiously stuck a contract under their hand. We can agree that wouldn’t be valid, right?
(And yes, I think german law has the right principle there: clauses which are "unexpected" to an average consumer are invalid with consumers (different in B2B context), thus risk as consumer is low when blindly accepting)
It is like a child signing a contract. The child isn't bound to it, but the other party is. In this case, a corporation attempted to use an extreme disparity in knowledge and power to take advantage of a much weaker party. The disparity is larger than that between an average adult and an average child. As a consequence of this, it seems just as fair as in the case of contracts signed by children.
I don't know if I'd go that far. There's a whole class of laws around protecting children (two quick examples here in the US: age of consent; being tried as a minor vs tried as an adult) because the reality is that, in general, children are easier than adults to exploit. I mean, I convinced my nephew over the holiday that eating all his broccoli was like doing extra credit for Santa Claus, so it would cancel out the naughty action of eating one of the cookies he put out for Santa.
Saying that an adult agreeing to an unread ToS is unenforceable because we don't hold children accountable for signed contracts is plain nonsense.
So I do not see how the overall idea can be dismissed as nonsense.
You are able and chose not to. (Unless maybe you have a mental disability and then some caretaker)
Accept button clicking is not witnessed. Any contract so-signed should be good for all of $10 worth of dispute. No more.
