Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by karmonhardan 590 days ago
Except Valve, for their Steam service. But that's only because someone realized that you could Zerg rush them with arbitration claims, whose fees they were obliged to pay (since their ToS forced users into it). Their only option that wouldn't be massively disruptive financially, in that case, would be to agree to a settlement with the arb representatives. So, now, you're only allowed to sue Valve, in a specific court of their choosing.
2 comments

I'm pretty ignorant about these kinds of things so how does this work? If Valve can specify the court to be used couldn't the company always choose something like Alaska or Hawaii where it would be difficult to show up?
The key to mass arbitration filing is that it's the lawyers doing it, and they're the ones showing up wherever in place of the people who have signed agreements with them. Said lawyers are essentially gambling that the target company will give up and allow normal legal maneuevers, because doing arbitration en masse is actually really expensive for the company mandating arbitration.
FWIW I’ve started to see new arbitration agreements pop up that specifically try to disallow this strategy by using verbiage like “ only the consumer is allowed to file this claim” and even “lawyers who would handle more than 20 of these claims are not allowed to file them”. I have no clue of the legality of such clauses but I have seen them in the wild in the last few months
It generally has to be somewhere they do business, so it can't be completely arbitrary.
This case is about ticketmaster changing the TOS to use a new arbiter after they fell for that trick with their last one. The new arbiter has rules that prevent mass arbitration