All right, you've signed up to Youtube, Gmail or whatever other online service. You're offered Terms of Service (ToS) and Privacy Policy but you just click them away and start using the service. This will come to bite you in the neck later on. You see, terms of service are hugely complex, layered and have one goal in mind – protecting the platform from you. As such, terms of service go through two stages alongside the originating company: startup, wherein the terms pupate, and corporate, in which ToS bears its actual fruit.
If you read my other pages on how corporations think, you'll already know what's coming. Obviously, the platform needs users, including you, to foster intense growth and create a chain reaction of adoption. This is the startup phase. Terms of service are typically open, friendly and welcoming (Patreon's).
Bright colors! Easy words! Plenty of spacing! Animated videos with upbeat music! Relax, it's all fine, it's just some dumb rules you don't have to know about. Oh, invite your friends to the platform too, look, we've got emojis, bright colors, a cool app with notifications etc. At the startup stage, terms of service allow a lot of leeway. Inevitably, someone will do something to force the introduction of stricter terms.
This something can be mean words or just wrongthink, but doesn't matter because it's just an excuse for stricter ToS that were planned all along. With the restrictions, users feeling uneasy and nervous. "I'm making money through <platform>, they won't ban me, will they?"
Once the startup matures, it's time for some heavy pruning of userbase. ToS is heavily modified to restrict all sorts of things that were previously allowed. That's not necessarily the case with all platforms, but the option is there and all companies eventually use it in some manner. Users can only comply because by that point they're typically too invested to leave.
While startups are manned by enthusiastic, energetic young people, corporations are typically run by conservative, data-driven mummies, who scoff at ideals that attracted the users in the first place. These ideals can't be outright denounced, but they can be slowly shaved off, which is how a company slowly turns from a freedom-loving startup to a corporation obsessed with micromanaging everything.
ToS are typically considered to be as binding as contracts. In fact, Microsoft has sued people over EULA they've clicked "Agree" on and won. Courts consistently ruled that EULA clickwrap agreements are legitimate contracts, unless their rules are reprehensive and morally repugnant. Granted, ToS and EULA are two distinct things but I can't imagine courts admitting the latter but rejecting the former; they're basically the same and likely have the same legal weight.
So, ToS is a contract that you agree to when signing up for a service, yet one party can unilaterally change the conditions of this contract without prior announcement or ability to negotiate the terms. Yeah, don't give me that "30 days advance notice", in business world 30 days flies by faster than a memo. If you're signed up for Paypal and get a notice of ToS change, 30 days is not nearly enough time to find another payment processor. Worse yet, companies never change ToS to benefit the customer, it's always to benefit the company in some way, either by raising fees or cutting down on services provided.
A fair company would have such ToS that equally protects the customer and the company. Any changes would be done on a fixed date and announced well in advance, say six months. If I had a company, I'd schedule any ToS changes for January 1st, meaning you as a customer could plan building a business way ahead of time and hold off on signficant investment in my company until you see if there's any ToS changes coming January 1st.
ToS changes should also be done to benefit the users, not just because I as a CEO want to protect my investment. I would do polls and transparent feedback studies to gather as much information from my users – what would you like changed? In this way, there would be a clear direction of the platform towards something the users want, meaning they'd gladly accept ToS changes come January 1st.
I'd also include the concept of grandfathered users. In law, if something was made under a previously valid law that got updated, it's generally considered legal right now, which is called "grandfathering". So, if you signed up in 2020 for my platform, you'd have your account treated according to the 2020 ToS even 10 or 20 years down the line, which is such a simple concept that it boggles my mind how I'm first to think of it.
How can you be held accountable for a contract that unilaterally changed without your input or choice? The fact platforms can lure you into signing up for their services and then radically change ToS to suddenly delete your previous content or refuse providing the same service is downright criminal, yet people just accept it without a whimper.
Major platforms provide free services only to lure users in, grow user numbers, get word-of-mouth marketing and leech their data. In such an environment, it's impossible to get fair terms and yet we feel compelled to give in anyway. Why else do you think Google lets you make a Youtube channel? By training yourself to use the same service, you become a captive user, who can't leave because everything is stacked against him and will keep getting stacked more and more.
I'd like to someday create a fair company, offering transparent ToS that gets modified once a year in accordance with user feedback, with older users grandfathered into the new ToS. Does that sound too idealistic? I don't think so. I believe there's enough room for corporate growth while retaining this idealistic notion of helping the fellow man.