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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Maybe there are no specific scenarios, and it's just to be safe. If you were Google, why wouldn't you add such a clause? It's not like it's going to scare customers away.

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Shouldn't it scare away customers that a company will only do business with them if they cannot be held in court for misdeeds regarding that business? I sadly understand that consumers don't read the fine print. But really, this clause should be treated as a dealbreaker.

It won't because usually your options are 50 Mbit line (maybe 100 if you're really lucky) or a 1Gb line for the same price.

I'd happily take the arbitration clause for 10x and probably 20x the speedup.

Beyond that, your other options will also usually include arbitration clauses. If it's a deal-breaker for choosing Google, it'll be a deal-breaker for choosing anyone else.

That's a fair point. As the article's title points out, Comcast does the same.

Does FairPoint?

http://www.fairpoint.com/document/Residential_HSI_Terms_of_S...

This document, found via a quick search, doesn't seem to contain the word "arbitration".

Yes, it will scare them into the arms of one of the many other ISPs in town offering reasonable service without the arbitration agreement.

OHWAIT.

Maybe it should be, but it isn't. Google probably doesn't care about losing the three tenths of one thousandth of a percent of customers who will 1) read the terms and 2) care enough about the arbitration clause to abandon ship.

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