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Berder's avatar

Another thing that occurred to me is, what if the voucher sets in the contract that binding arbitration must be used for disputes, and the client must waive their right to sue? Then the arbitrator has incentives to be heavily biased in favor of the voucher, similar to the National Arbitration Forum, which ruled in favor of the consumer 0.2% of the time.

I think you would want to prevent mandatory binding arbitration - I think there are a lot of contract terms between voucher and client that would have to be banned for the whole system to be a net benefit to the clients. But would these terms actually be banned, given the political pressures by the vouchers not to ban them, and the fact that contract terms like that (mandatory binding arbitration) are currently common practice?

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Berder's avatar

It's not the fact that cartels are concentrated that makes them treat people in their territory poorly; small street gangs behave the same way. What makes them act poorly is a lack of external accountability for mistreating people, and a profit motive for mistreating people.

So I think you're saying that the voucher is only authorized to use force against its own clients as specified in the contract, not clients of other vouchers. Who is actually enforcing this contract? It's not enough to say that the client can sue. What if the voucher physically prevents the client from being able to sue, or prevents them from collecting any evidence with which to sue? What if the client is too poor or too dumb to successfully sue?

Modern corporations tend to put terms very unfavorable to the customer in their contracts. These contracts tend to be extremely long, and do little but grant rights to the corporation: they aren't liable for anything, they get to do whatever they want with your data, you can't do anything they don't want with their software. Legally the individual is supposed to have read and understood the entire contract, but no one does.

Unless prevented by law, we would expect the voucher to do the same thing with their client contracts: have extremely difficult to understand, enormous contracts that no one reads, and that grant the voucher very favorable terms. This could be much more dangerous than a software click-through, considering the amount of power you are proposing these vouchers would have.

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