>Why should a government prohibit private parties from agreeing to anything other than those 3 things?

because ToS have been long used to demand unreasonable things and threaten people with expensive lawsuits. The advantage of companies losing bullying power significantly outweighs the disadvantage of less business freedom

ToS are normally "contracts" (hard to even call them that) between a large corporation with very high resources for a lawsuit and an individual with very low resources. The power imbalance makes challenging ToS for the individual unfeasible in 99% of cases

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stinkbeetle 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> because ToS have been long used to demand unreasonable things and threaten people with expensive lawsuits. The advantage of companies losing bullying power significantly outweighs the disadvantage of less business freedom

Why those in particular though? The criminal law one sure that's a part of contract law already. Why the others? Why not different ones? It was just asserted that those were reasonable and no other terms are.

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alpinisme an hour ago | parent [-]

The original comment asserted that there are “probably” a finite list of reasonable things everyone could agree on. The examples were parenthetical and surely not meant to be the last word.

The point they were making (rightly or wrongly) seems to be that contract law just isn’t the right way of managing consumer-business relationships. I suspect that actually meshes with the intuitions of a broad swath of the population, who want a reliable, predictable, consistent, and consumer-beneficial set of norms and laws around all consumption so that it is easy to manage and understand when you are departing from the norm and to be able to confidently conduct a public life knowing that your purchases are not subjecting you to any surprising gotchas other than having lost the money and having acquired a product.

You could take this line of thought charitably in another direction to assert that “unusual” agreements are presumed unenforceable but not that there are no legal mechanisms for adding additional clauses.

	▲	fauigerzigerk 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps there should be a limited set of standard clauses that companies can pick from and that consumers can read and compare like food labels.