Well yeah. Terms of service don’t exist for the benefit of the users. If the company doesn’t like what you are doing, nothing stops them from banning you, there’s no reason to expect them to try to be fair about it. This is why these sites/apps having a dominant position is such a problem.
Terms of service is actually a two party agreement. It’s very weak on the consumer side due to capitalism, but it’s technically enforceable. Hence, all the class action lawsuits happens when company side breaks that agreement. They need to show that you broke terms of service to justify a ban. Prior to both sides agreeing, they can refuse to allow you to use the service for any reason. People seems to conflate these two things.
If companies terms of service said “we can do whatever we want whenever we want, and we don’t have to promise any service, and you have no rights” nobody would sign those terms.
If companies terms of service said “we can do whatever we want whenever we want, and we don’t have to promise any service, and you have no rights” nobody would sign those terms.
Nobody who took the time to read the terms of service, and who felt that there was a real risk of those terrible terms being invoked, and who felt they had a viable alternative. But for the other 99.9% of people, they will just hit agree and move on.
Maybe until they got screwed once, and then they would. It would also be illegal in most countries, since there are laws (weak they might be) that guarantee some things.
I don’t buy it. If you have examples of someone successfully suing to be unbanned because the ban was beyond the terms of service I’ll be convinced but I don’t think that’s ever happened or would ever happen because I don’t think terms of service waive any rights to deny access to servers the company owns, especially when it’s free to begin with.
From the article:
At the end of the day, platforms like Discord have no obligation to host anything they don’t want to host, as we discussed back when GitLab did something similar by deplatforming Suyu’s code.
“Their first email was that my account has broken the TOS, with no additional information.” He claims Sudachi wasn’t doing anything infringing. Later, he was told it vaguely had something to do with intellectual property but says Discord still hasn’t given him any details.
The bans I’ve gotten myself are always like this when it’s a big company. No real explanation given, no recourse possible, I don’t expect a lawyer would tell me differently. IMO the only solution is to stop focusing on the “rules” they have written entirely for their own benefit and start using systems that are more decentralized in terms of who is actually in control.
Well yeah. Terms of service don’t exist for the benefit of the users. If the company doesn’t like what you are doing, nothing stops them from banning you, there’s no reason to expect them to try to be fair about it. This is why these sites/apps having a dominant position is such a problem.
Terms of service is actually a two party agreement. It’s very weak on the consumer side due to capitalism, but it’s technically enforceable. Hence, all the class action lawsuits happens when company side breaks that agreement. They need to show that you broke terms of service to justify a ban. Prior to both sides agreeing, they can refuse to allow you to use the service for any reason. People seems to conflate these two things.
If companies terms of service said “we can do whatever we want whenever we want, and we don’t have to promise any service, and you have no rights” nobody would sign those terms.
Nobody who took the time to read the terms of service, and who felt that there was a real risk of those terrible terms being invoked, and who felt they had a viable alternative. But for the other 99.9% of people, they will just hit agree and move on.
Maybe until they got screwed once, and then they would. It would also be illegal in most countries, since there are laws (weak they might be) that guarantee some things.
I don’t buy it. If you have examples of someone successfully suing to be unbanned because the ban was beyond the terms of service I’ll be convinced but I don’t think that’s ever happened or would ever happen because I don’t think terms of service waive any rights to deny access to servers the company owns, especially when it’s free to begin with.
From the article:
The bans I’ve gotten myself are always like this when it’s a big company. No real explanation given, no recourse possible, I don’t expect a lawyer would tell me differently. IMO the only solution is to stop focusing on the “rules” they have written entirely for their own benefit and start using systems that are more decentralized in terms of who is actually in control.