Why Terms Of Service Are Unreadable

Almost nobody reads the agreement they accept before using a service, and the companies producing those agreements know it. The documents are unreadable because their real audience is not the user.

The document is written for a dispute

A terms of service exists mainly to be useful if something goes wrong. Its performance is judged by how it holds up when a lawyer or a judge examines a specific clause.

That standard rewards precision and completeness over comprehension. A sentence that covers every foreseeable case is better in a dispute than a sentence anyone enjoys reading.

Since the reader who matters arrives years later with a particular question, the writing is optimized for looking things up rather than for reading straight through.

Definitions expand to close gaps

Legal drafting defines ordinary words because ordinary words are argued about. Content, device, use and account each become defined terms with boundaries that everyday usage lacks.

Every definition then has to be respected everywhere it appears, so sentences fill with capitalized terms that force the reader back to the definitions section.

The effect compounds. A document with several dozen defined terms cannot be read linearly, which is a structural obstacle rather than a matter of vocabulary.

Old language survives because it has been tested

Clauses that courts have interpreted carry a known meaning, and rewriting one in plainer words trades a settled interpretation for an unknown one.

Drafters therefore inherit phrasing from earlier agreements, and unfamiliar constructions persist because their familiarity to courts outweighs their strangeness to everyone else.

This is a real constraint, not laziness, and it is why simplification efforts tend to add a plain-language summary alongside the operative text rather than replacing it.

Nobody is paid for readability

The cost of an unread agreement falls on users, who have no way to price it and, in practice, no ability to negotiate any of it.

The cost of an ambiguous clause falls on the company. Only one of those costs shows up on anyone's desk, so only one gets managed.

Regulators in some areas have responded by mandating standardized summary formats, on the reasoning that a fixed short form is the only version people will actually compare.

What is worth reading anyway

A handful of sections carry most of the practical consequence: how disputes are resolved, what rights are granted over material a user uploads, how the agreement can change, and how to cancel.

Those sections are usually short and findable by heading, which makes targeted reading feasible even when full reading is not.

Anything with real financial or legal exposure attached is a matter for an attorney, since enforceability of particular clauses varies by state and shifts over time.