"Here's a device we sold you, but when you first turn it on you need to sign this 30 page contract which says you actually don't own the device, if you are mad at us you have to go to our preferred arbitration, and we reserve the right to turn your device off at any time on a whim because you left a bad review somewhere. Sign it or enjoy your worthless brick which we will not refund. Oh, and now every single manufacturer requires the same thing for this device class. So you can either have a washing machine or hand wash your cloths in your bathtub".
My opinion is that is a fraudulent rental masquerading as a sale.
And any and all EULAs or similar documents presented after a sale should be completely null and void. But any corporation attempting to that should be fined a signficant portion of their revenue. Past that, dissolution of company.
But no, we live in a shit society that someone who signs up for a demo of Disney+ and then has his wife die due to bad food, and they tried to slap indefinite arbitration on him.
Yeah, contract law is simply busted here. If it were sane, these contracts would be deemed null and void. In fact, common contract law does require that both sides be compensated. It doesn't require fair or reasonable compensation and that's the big problem.
But I think there is an argument to be made that the EULA has no compensation. Since payment has already been made for the product, it's completely one sided.
I don't know how it works in the US but in the UK a contract term that you cannot read before purchase is simply not part of the contract and hence completely unenforceable. As far as I can tell this is the case all over the world, except it seems the US.
It may actually be the case in the US. The problem is it's really hard to take something like this to court.
For starters, the arbitration clause is designed to make sure that these cases never get to the supreme court. Lower courts see an arbitration clause and say "Thank god, I don't want to deal with this" and are more than happy to sweep cases that way to unload their docket. Once in arbitration, any ruling made has no precedent setting value. The arbitration process is itself designed to drive up legal costs.
But even if that arbitration clause wasn't there or a judge decides to hear the case, it's incredibly expensive to take someone to court. Hundreds if not millions of dollars in fees. The US doesn't have a "loser pay" system, instead both sides are responsible for their own legal fees. Further, the US doesn't have any sort of public civil litigators. We barely have criminal defenders.
The best case scenario is that some sort of class action is built up. But that's really hard and isn't likely to address the contract itself. Even if it does, it'll only be the one contract for the one manufacturer.
Big legal fees, limited applicability, likely burden shifting from public courts. The only way this gets addressed would be through regulation or new laws outlawing the practice.