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by hnburnsy 632 days ago
Lawyers are forming mass arbitration groups, costing companies thousands per arbitration case...

>For example, in the TurboTax case, a judge tallied (PDF) Intuit’s potential costs for the arbitrations to be at least $128 million—$3,200 for each of the 40,000 clients represented by Keller Lenkner, the firm behind the mass arbitration.

https://www.consumerreports.org/money/contracts-arbitration/...

So companies are removing the provision...

>Finally, companies may want to reconsider whether individual mandatory arbitration still represents the best dispute resolution system for their needs. Some companies already have opted to revert to court litigation and class actions, although the majority – even after having to face a mass arbitration – continue to use arbitration, albeit with several of the risk mitigation strategies described above.

https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2022/2022-06-30-how-comp...

2 comments

Microsoft got around this in some of their agreements by adding provisions to "throttle" arbitration so that if a lot of customers file arbitration at once, they may have to wait months or years to have their case heard.

Binding Arbitration was already a blatant sidestepping of the American Constitution and general corporate accountability, but leave it to Microsoft, a monopolist with government contracts, to take it to another level. The only binding arbitration agreement I've seen which compared was Linode's, which included a gag clause.

I mean look at the shit Disney tried to pull recently saying a park guest couldn't sue after her husband died due to negligence on the parks behalf because they acknowledged D+ subscriber agreement that specified arbitration.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/14/business/disney-plus-wrongful...

They backed away from it but they tried.

Ahh I thought Valve had suddenly decided to do something consumer fiendly. Lol.
Suddenly?

- steam families

- removing the monopoly of windows gaming on PCs

- removing a ton of game piracy by making a platform people want to use

- progressing Linux desktop to be in a usable state

???

>- removing the monopoly of windows gaming on PCs

by becoming a monopoly? A lot of this ball started rolling because Wolfire accused Valve of price fixing. Pretty much the worst thing you can do.

And if you didn't read the ToS update: this is

1) RETROACTIVE application of this arbitration (remember when we got mad at companies trying to apply terms to the past)?

2) option out requires you to delete your Steam account. Holding your potential hundreds or thousands of dollars of games as hostage.

I don't think people realize how absurd this is.

>removing a ton of game piracy

Except when you need another third party account, then suddenly piracy is convinient again.

>progressing Linux desktop to be in a usable state

By relying on a windows environment, sure. I still yearn for native Linux gaming.

Sounds like embrace, extend, extinguish to me. Jk