A group of legal experts has delayed a controversial vote about contracts that affects any internet user who’s clicked “Agree” without really reading a platform’s terms of service.
It’s difficult to buy products, use apps, or even go online without accepting the terms of dauntingly long user agreements, which govern everything from how companies use your data to whether you can sue them. People almost universally ignore these contracts, which has created a conundrum for courts: when has a user meaningfully agreed to something, and when is a company taking advantage of their ignorance?
The powerful American Law Institute (ALI) hoped to solve this problem with something called the Restatement of the Law of Consumer Contracts. The proposal...