Putting An End To The Biggest Lie On The Internet
It's long been said that “I agree to the terms of service” is the biggest lie on the internet. And even if you do read them, many TOS are so ridden with legalese that you practically need to be a lawyer to understand them.
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch's August 2012 column gives national reach to a complaint that had been circulating for years — InfoWorld flagged the same dynamic back in 2007 with its report that Amazon makes you lie to log off, showing the forced-consent checkout flow was already old news five years earlier.
What changed by 2012 was distribution: the piece was picked up same-week by ZDNet, The Verge, TechSpot, Help Net Security, gHacks, Betabeat, ANIMAL and Pulse2, turning a familiar gripe into a broadly shared indictment of click-through legalese across both security and consumer-tech press.
First-order effects
- Users clicking 'I agree' on Amazon-style flows continue granting broad contractual rights they have no realistic chance of reading, which is precisely the gap between legal formality and informed consent the column targets.
Second-order effects
- Services that publish plain-language summaries or rate each other's terms gain a trust differentiator over rivals still hiding behind dense legalese, creating commercial pressure toward readable agreements.
Third-order effects
- If click-through consent remains enforceable while staying effectively unread, the burden of comprehension migrates from individual users to shared infrastructure — crowdsourced ratings, standardized summaries, and layered notice designs built by third parties rather than the companies writing the terms.
The trend: Online consent is shifting from unreadable click-through contracts toward third-party summarization and structured, scannable terms as the practical substitute for reading.