[fieldcny]

Arbitration is just another power grab by companies, originally the government would keep this sort of excess and greed in check, as we have successively dismantled that capability the people of this country had to turn to the courts to seek redress and enforce the cost of consequences of mismanagement back on to the balance sheets of the companies via legal liabilities.

This was supposed to be the mechanism that enforced market penalization envisaged by capitalism, especially in sectors where choice was limited or no other options existed.

Companies got tired of having to deal with lawsuits that resulted from the misbehavior of their organizations so they started pushing binding arbitration clauses, and because no one gives a fuck about the people in this country they have been able to push this as an effective and cheap mechanism to shut customers up and remove their rights.

However you feel about corporations, they are entities that exists only because our social contract allows them to, they haven’t always existed and if we keep granting them or allowing them greater rights and freedoms than the actual people in this country, they may not always exist.

[HDThoreaun]

Arbitration makes sense when you think about how costly the court system is. The problem is that the defendant gets to choose the arbiter, so its not a fair system. If the arbiter was neutral I think arbitration would generally be better than the traditional court system in many cases as its easier to use without legal representation.

[jordanb]

The "defense" would argue that the arbitrator was mutually selected when the contract was signed, because the "plantiff" agreed to the contract terms.

The fact that the contract was non-negotiable should have made it a "contract of adhesion" where the plaintiff is recognized to have little choice in the details and the courts should provide scrutiny to ensure that they were equitable. But the supreme court has decided that "contracts of adhesion" don't really exist because you always had the choice to not have a cell phone or internet service or a job.

[SoftTalker]

> its easier to use without legal representation

Not really. Any corporation will be represented in an arbitration by lawyers. The arbiter will likely be a lawyer. You will be bamboozled by their arguments and the best you can hope for is to make a reasonably clear statement of your claim and hope that the arbiter doesn't agree with some technical argument the other side has.

And (I don't know if it always works this way) you will take turns speaking with the arbiter, you will not directly hear or be able to question/challenge what the the other party is saying.

[pessimizer]

> Arbitration makes sense when you think about how costly the court system is.

The court system isn't required to be trash. That's like how we made immigration so impossible that we just let people in illegally. It's a pretense. If official justice is so burdensome that we have to create extensive private legal systems, we should figure out a sane way to do things.

People who have the power to make decisions prefer it this way.

[fieldcny]

The court system is expensive because it’s the wrong mechanism to address this aspect of corporate and monopoly power, frankly all companies have gotten too large they aren’t efficient at any thing other than redistribution of the fruits of labor increasingly unfairly all the way up the organizational chart.

The fact that no-one fails no matter the egregiousness of their actions or behaviors is absurd.

[johnnyanmac]

Well sadly, the mechanism made to disrupt such monopolies will probably be crippled in 6-12 months, maybe even sooner. We're definitely in a plutocracy .

[account42]

Because those mechanisms have been working so well for the past four years?

[blackeyeblitzar]

Yep big companies basically have too much capital to fail. They own distribution channels they seek rent on. No one else can get ahead of them. A small company making a mistake will die. A large company will not even notice it.