[sneak]

Is your issue that it’s 40 pages? Is your issue the font size?

What are the criteria that make terms by which one accesses a service irrelevant? At what point does the service provider’s consent not matter?

Your last paragraph seems to assume I am a service provider. I am not. I just think that people should be bound to the things to which they explicitly agree.

Does the “user must scroll to the bottom of the terms and tick a box affirming that they read and have agreed” serve as sufficient consent in your book?

[tialaramex]

Courts _might_ decide that some terms are acceptable if they are particularly brought to the other party's attention. Bold type and larger fonts are one way to achieve that in a written contract that a court reasonably concludes you would/ should have actually read. Legislation sometimes explicitly requires that a term is highlighted this way.

You're just not going to sell a court on the theory that your free web service has a contract everybody is actually going to read -- so it won't matter how many pages or how large the typeface is.

People being "bound to the things to which they explicitly agree" is actually a problem for a reason I'll get to in a moment, but beyond that the problem for online services and other trivial contracts is that nobody really "explicitly agrees" to them, saying something doesn't make it so, or else all those things Jefferson claimed to be "self-evident" truths wouldn't require any effort to uphold.

Now, even when we actually _have_ agreement, not just somebody clicking OK to make the computer stop bugging them, we still run into a problem. Some terms are inherently prohibited in our society. You simply cannot agree to them even if you want to.