US court of appeals rules online ToS are binding irrespective of whether users read them, no matter how long or hard to read companies like Uber make them
Greg Bensinger / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
This ruling lands at the end of a two-year legal fight over Uber's driver agreements. After a San Francisco district judge expanded the driver class action and ruled some of Uber's arbitration agreements unenforceable [[a:837664]], Uber issued a new agreement that the same court declined to apply to the drivers already suing, admonishing the company over the confusion its paperwork caused [[a:838254]].
The appeals court's answer closes that gap from the other direction: online terms bind users whether or not they read them, no matter how long or dense companies make them. That gives platforms like Uber the enforceability the lower-court rulings had withheld — while the later wave of GDPR-driven ToS rewrites shows where regulatory pressure pulls the opposite way.
First-order effects
- Uber and comparable platforms gain a solid doctrinal basis to enforce arbitration clauses and other terms against users and drivers who never read them, removing the 'unread contract' defense from litigation like the California driver class action.
- Companies drafting deliberately long or hard-to-read terms face no judicial penalty for opacity under this ruling — length itself becomes legally costless.
Second-order effects
- Consumer-side lawyers and regulators shift their attack from enforceability to comprehension, the route the GDPR compliance wave took when companies simplified their terms because invalid consent would void the agreement entirely [[a:928745]].
- Litigation over platform terms moves upstream from individual disputes to the drafting stage, as plaintiffs' counsel target how agreements are written rather than whether they were read.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US and EU contract regimes diverge structurally: American courts enforce click-through terms as written, while European consent law forces plain-language drafts — leaving global platforms maintaining two tiers of terms for the same product.
- Terms of service harden into a genuine instrument of platform power, with the burden of understanding shifted almost entirely onto users unless regulators intervene.
The trend: Click-through contracts are being enforced as written by US courts even as consent-based regulation like GDPR pushes companies toward terms users can actually understand.