How companies weaponize the terms of service against you

Summary

Decoder with Nilay Patel – Episode Summary

Episode Title: How companies weaponize the terms of service against you
Guest: Brendan Ballou, Founder of the Public Integrity Project and author of "When Companies Run the Courts"
Release Date: May 14, 2026
Podcast: Decoder, The Verge

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the ways corporations use terms of service (ToS) and arbitration clauses to shield themselves from legal consequences, effectively undermining consumers’ and employees’ rights. Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel hosts returning guest Brendan Ballou, whose new book "When Companies Run the Courts" examines the systemic shift toward forced arbitration and its consequences for American justice. The conversation also touches on current anti-corruption efforts and explores how state-level action and innovative legal approaches might reclaim power for the public.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Current Legal Battles and Corruption (03:21 - 10:45)

• Public Integrity Project’s Paramount Lawsuit:
  • Brendan describes his organization’s suit seeking documents from Paramount regarding alleged corruption—possible deals made with the Trump administration for regulatory favor (03:21).
  • He explains the use of shareholder rights (through press-related organizations) to request “books and records”—a standard legal mechanism but used here to uncover political influence in media acquisitions (04:54).
• State vs. Federal Enforcement:
  • Brendan notes a distinction between federal enforcers (currently indifferent or hostile to corporate accountability) and federal courts, where lower courts sometimes still push back against corruption (08:04).
  • State Attorneys General are positioned as key actors—recent wins show they can take effective action where federal DOJ won’t (10:45).

2. Rise and Machinery of Forced Arbitration (11:24 – 19:32)

• Definition and Impact:
  • Forced arbitration replaces open court with private, usually corporate-funded adjudication, resulting in lopsided outcomes (11:27, 13:29).
  • “Consumers win 89% of the time in small claims court, they win 20 to 30% of the time in forced arbitration;… Before one arbitration company, it was 0.2%.” – Brendan Ballou (13:29)
• Real-Life Consequences:
  • Nilay and Brendan recount stories where ToS clauses barred meaningful justice, e.g., Disney attempting to use a Disney+ ToS to force a wrongful death suit into arbitration (14:11).
  • Arbitration often covers even egregious harms, and outcomes are usually secret (14:50).
• Judicial Endorsement and the Scalia Effect:
  • Courts, especially the conservative-majority Supreme Court, have enabled forced arbitration, stretching a 1925 law (intended for business disputes) to cover ordinary consumers and employees (16:25, 18:19).
  • Antonin Scalia is highlighted as a pivotal figure who used textualist arguments to benefit corporations, notably with decisions that shut down class actions (19:53 - 22:27).

3. Class Actions, Terms of Service & Legal Workarounds (22:27 – 34:21)

• Killing Class Actions:
  • "One of the key purposes of forced arbitration is to kill class actions." – Brendan Ballou (20:20)
  • Without class actions, only the most costly harms are litigated; everyday abuses (e.g., hidden fees) go unchallenged (21:10).
• Non-Negotiable Terms of Service:
  • Nilay points out the absurdity of living in a society where using a phone requires agreeing to unreadable, one-sided contracts—contracts of adhesion that can’t be negotiated (25:55).
  • Brendan doubts the Supreme Court will reverse course soon due to its pro-corporate and insular nature, compounded by big-money influences in appointments (27:10).
• State-Level Solutions and Legal “Hacks”:
  • California’s Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) empowers workers to sue on the state's behalf, circumventing arbitration for workplace abuses (30:21).
  • Workarounds abound because passing federal reforms is so hard; the patchwork nature of fixes matches the broader dysfunction (31:59).

4. How to Fix Arbitration and Restore Justice (34:21 – 52:09)

• Making Arbitration More Fair:
  • Brendan suggests reforms: require hearings to be public, mandates for written decisions, transparent arbitrator records, more discovery rights, and appeals (28:24).
  • “The more arbitration can become like a regular court, both arbitration itself will become fairer and companies will become less attracted to it.” – Brendan Ballou (29:29)
• Breaking the System—Mass Arbitration:
  • Clever lawyers exploited companies’ promise to pay arbitration fees by initiating thousands of claims at once, driving up costs and forcing settlements (37:19).
  • The approach forces companies to rethink their agreements but has led them to seek less reputable arbitration providers or change their terms again (41:46).
  • “Mass arbitration is really a way to turn arbitration on its head and say, okay, companies, if you're going to force us to do this, we're actually going to do it, but you're going to have to pay a bunch of costs.” – Brendan Ballou (37:33)
• AI and the Future of Dispute Resolution:
  • Recent trends point to AI-powered arbitration for “sophisticated parties,” but Brendan sees fundamental legitimacy and transparency issues (44:03).
  • “For a justice system to work, people need to be bought into its legitimacy. And I think it's very hard to buy into the legitimacy of a large language model that's essentially a black box.” – Brendan Ballou (44:13)
• Dynamic Outcomes and Arbitrary Justice:
  • Nilay worries about a future of personalized—but arbitrary—rules and prices, all mediated by contracts and algorithms, eroding the principle that similar cases yield similar outcomes (45:58).
  • Brendan argues that forced arbitration both reflects and accelerates the fragmentation of social consensus and justice (47:17, 48:52).

5. Hope, Agency & Collective Action (49:01 – End)

• Despair vs. Action:
  • Nilay connects the spread of forced arbitration and perceived arbitrary corporate power to rising nihilism among young people; it’s not just about contracts but the sense of being powerless against large systems (49:01).
  • Brendan urges listeners to choose an issue, stick with it, and remember that individuals (and small dedicated groups) can effect meaningful change, citing examples from his career (51:10).
• Practical Steps:
  • “We're not going to ethically consume our way out of this problem. This is… something we are going to solve collectively. Ultimately, that's going to happen in city councils and state legislatures.” – Brendan Ballou (52:20)
  • He offers model legislation on his website and encourages listeners to get involved in advocacy at the state and local level.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On the Power of Arbitration Clauses:
  “It’s kind of extraordinary for folks to imagine that, you know, by signing up for a streaming service, you could essentially sign away your right to sue over your wife’s death.”
  —Brendan Ballou (14:11)
• On Terms of Service:
  “The legal fiction that anyone has actually read these contracts is like, the foundation of the American economy.”
  —Nilay Patel (25:55)
• On Workarounds:
  “Our approach to the American legal system right now generally is like a series of hacks and magic words.”
  —Nilay Patel (31:26)
• On Mass Arbitration:
  “There were some very funny court decisions where judges who had been watching their powers slip away ... say, it is sort of the height of irony that these companies are now trying to escape these things and compelled them to pay these costs.”
  —Brendan Ballou (37:45)
• On Justice and AI:
  “For a justice system to work, people need to be bought into its legitimacy. And I think it's very hard to buy into the legitimacy of a large language model that's essentially a black box.”
  —Brendan Ballou (44:13)
• On Agency:
  “I remain incredibly hopeful about the power of individual people if they stick with something to make progress, because I have seen it happen over and over and over again.”
  —Brendan Ballou (51:45)
• On Collective Solutions:
  “We're not going to ethically consume our way out of this problem. …This is, to your earlier point, something we are going to solve collectively.”
  —Brendan Ballou (52:20)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Intro to Paramount Lawsuit & Corruption (03:21 – 10:45)
• Explaining Forced Arbitration & Real-World Cases (13:29 – 15:41)
• Supreme Court’s Role & Scalia’s Influence (19:32 – 22:27)
• Class Actions and Terms of Service Dilemmas (20:20 – 25:55)
• State Solutions: California’s Example (30:21 – 31:26)
• Fixing Arbitration—Proposals and Realities (28:24 – 34:21)
• Mass Arbitration as a “Hack” (37:19 – 41:46)
• AI, Dynamic Outcomes & the Future of Dispute Resolution (44:03 – 48:52)
• Hope, Empowerment, and Collective Action (49:01 – End)

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Conclusion

This episode of Decoder offers a sobering and detailed exploration of how arcane-seeming legal clauses in everyday contracts—especially forced arbitration agreements—strip ordinary people of legal recourse while shielding powerful corporations. It underscores the Supreme Court’s role in entrenching these practices but balances the bleakness with practical hope: state-level reforms, creative legal tactics, and collective action can all shift the balance back toward justice. Both the emotional resonance (“nihilism” among young consumers) and the concrete path forward (model legislation, advocacy) leave listeners with reasons for both outrage and optimism.

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For further action, listeners are encouraged to visit brendanballou.com for resources and model laws to send to their own legislators.

Transcript

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[Nilay Patel]

Hello and welcome to Decoder.

I'm Neil Apatel, editor in chief of

the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Brendan Belew, founder of the Public Integrity Project and author of the new book When Companies Run the Courts, which is all about the rise of forced arbitration agreements. Brendan's actually been on the show before. His previous book, Plunder, was all about the rise of private equity in America, and that conversation was among our most popular episodes. Forced arbitration is similarly everywhere in our modern lives, deep in almost every single terms of service. For almost any product you buy or service you use, there's a clause that says by buying or using the thing, you're giving up your rights to join a class action lawsuit if something goes wrong. Instead, you have to take the company to arbitration, which the company usually pays for. You can see how there's a conflict there. There have been some really high profile cases these past few years highlighting how deeply unfair arbitration clauses can be to consumers. One you'll hear Brendan and I talk about, which we covered here on the Verge was the very sad example of a man whose wife died of an allergic reaction after eating at a Disney World restaurant. When the man sued, Disney tried to force him into arbitration instead, arguing that because he had signed up for Disney plus streaming service, he had waived his right to sue. There was massive public pushback to this, and Disney eventually relented, as you may recall. But there are thousands or maybe millions of other lower profile instances every year where consumers and employees have completely lost their rights to redress if something goes wrong. Brendan's book really delves into how and why we got here.

Spoiler.

You can blame Antonin Scalia for some of it, but also, most importantly, what we might be able to do about it in the future. One other note, Brendan and the Public Integrity Project are also in the early stages of legal action against Paramount over a possible quid pro quo with the Trump administration in its proposed Warner Brothers acquisition. So we started this conversation by talking about that. This is a really deep episode gets pretty existential. You'll see what I mean.

Okay, Bren and Blue.

When Companies Run the Courts. Here we go.

Brendan Ballou, welcome back to Decoder.

[Brendan Ballew]

Good to be here.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm excited to talk to you. The last time you were on the show, we introduced you as a former DOJ prosecutor in the antitrust division. We talked about your book Plunder, which is about private equity. You've got another cheerful deep dive on the rise of arbitration in America. The book is called When Companies Run the Courts. I really want to talk about that book. I have a lot of thoughts about terms of service agreements and arbitration, but it turns out you're. You're. You're here right after the Public Integrity Project has launched a big new initiative. You filed a lawsuit against Paramount over the Warner Brothers merger. Explain what's going on there.

[Brendan Ballew]

The Public Integrity Project, just to set a baseline, is a new public interest law firm that we're running to raise the legal and reputational cost of corruption in the United States. So in a world where the Department of Justice is not interested in pursuing corruption cases and in some cases, maybe facilitating corruption, we want to go after the folks inside of government that are being bribed and the folks outside of government that are trying to bribe them. So we brought a number of cases already. We sued the President for approving the illegal sale of TikTok's US assets to various administration allies. We sued the attorney General for failing to disclose fully the Epstein files in violation of the law. And now we are laying the foundation for. For bringing a suit against Paramount for potentially, at least based on public reporting, the Ellison family discussing with the president, administration officials potentially firing CNN anchors in exchange for regulatory approval of their acquisition of Warner Brothers. You know, that's profoundly troubling, the idea that a company or billionaires might agree to reshape the media landscape to the president's liking. And so we've made what's called a books and records demand to par. Paramount to understand what documents the board has about specifically these potential acts of corruption. So they have five calendar days to respond, and then potentially we can bring this to litigation in Delaware Chancery Court.

[Nilay Patel]

Are you the party or are you representing someone who has the right to demand books and records?

[Brendan Ballew]

We are representing two great organizations, the foundation for Freedom of the Press and Reporters Without Borders, both of whom represent journalists and the interests of the free press generally. They're also, individually, as organizations, shareholders in Paramount and so have the right to demand these books and records. And I should say this is about a big, you know, huge issue. But the actual thing that's being asked for here is very standard. You know, shareholders ask for this information all the time. So at least on the law, this is a very straightforward request.

[Nilay Patel]

This strikes me as a very interesting sort of mechanical approach to how to bring corruption to light.

[Brendan Ballew]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

You're going to find an interested party who is a shareholder, you're going to say, hey, there's these standard practices. Shareholders have access. Show me the documents that led to whatever deal we're going to get to, and then we can use that to prove there was some corruption at play. I unders, like, I, I think that's very clean. Like, I, I respect the cleverness of it. It strikes me that maybe these guys didn't write down, like, do corruption tomorrow. How do you think that's going to go?

[Brendan Ballew]

Yeah, no, absolutely. And you have the question about, you know, did they write it down? Do the documents still exist, all these sorts of things. I think there really is really interesting public reporting about the actions that Paramount took in its various acquisitions. So when David Ellison was trying to buy Paramount in the first place, when he just owned Skydance, there was really interesting public reporting saying that the Ellisons had agreed to a quote, unquote side deal with the president to provide millions of dollars in free advertising for causes that he supported, settle a transparently bogus lawsuit that he had against 60 minutes, and in exchange potentially get regulatory approval for the Paramount acquisition. So those are the sorts of decisions that actually a board would have to be involved in. And so it wouldn't be terribly surprising if there actually is some documentation at a high level about this stuff. And what's really great is this is the stuff that we can surface as private parties and what we can get out there in the public record can be enormously important. But the folks who can really get at this information are state attorneys general, you know, because they have what's called pre complaint discovery. So they can actually demand this information before even filing a lawsuit. And so if we find interesting information, potentially this is the sort of stuff that can empower state AGs to take action here.

[Nilay Patel]

Let me ask about that a little more in depth, because your book is about the court system and how it has generally pushed Americans towards private dispute resolution, private systems of law and how that's bad. Hopefully you get your books and records and you can move forward with whatever happens next. Is all the emphasis on the states now because it doesn't seem like the federal Department of Justice is that interested in it. It doesn't seem like the federal courts are. That seems like Chaos in a very specific way. And so, just from my perspective, there's the court of public opinion. CBS's ratings are down as they transparently make moves to please Trump. And then maybe a bunch of state AGs are going to say, hey, this is actually against the laws that we are charged with enforcing and that the federal system might have nothing to do with anything.

[Brendan Ballew]

I'd make a distinction there between the federal enforcers and the federal courts. I think you're exactly right that the federal enforcers now controlled by the Trump administration are absolutely indifferent to corporate corruption and in many ways seem to be trying to enable it. You see all these, frankly horrifying examples of rich people and companies giving money to various Trump allied campaign committees or businesses and so forth, and seeing their. Their government investigations dropped, their government lawsuits dropped, in some cases, their criminal prosecutions dropped. Like these are extraordinary, essentially unprecedented actions where people are able to literally buy their way out of the justice system. So I think we live in an era where we absolutely cannot count on federal enforcers to have any interest in going after rich criminals. And in fact, if I can just add to that, you know, there's sort of these individual examples of people buying their way out of the justice system. But at a more programmatic level, the Department of Justice is absolutely dismantling the entire infrastructure for going after rich criminals. You know, they disbanded the Tax division, which goes after rich tax cheats. They've kneecapped the antitrust division. They disbanded the klepto capture task force, which goes after Russian oligarchs. So, you know, we're really sort of destroying all the tools that we have for going after rich criminals. Those are the federal enforcers. I will say that there's a difference with federal courts. Now, obviously, the Supreme Court is an extraordinarily conservative court that's extremely supportive of this administration. But I can say, as a practicing lawyer, you know, the lower courts, I think, by and large are appalled by the corruption that's going on right now and have been taking actions to stop it. And there are a lot of tools that exist outside of federal enforcers that can be brought in state and federal court that actually can make a difference. You know, state attorneys general, like we just suggested, can be enormously valuable here. They have the ability to enforce all federal antitrust laws and are doing so. You saw them get that big win in the Ticketmaster case a few weeks ago when the federal DOJ abandoned them. That was extraordinary. But they also, you know, they have all sorts of tools on consumer protection. Anti fraud and so forth. And importantly, private plaintiffs have power here. And that's, you know, what the gap that we're trying to fill, which is there are so many people who have been harmed by this corruption. People, you know, we're talking about people that are buying their way out of the justice system. Many of those people owed millions of dollars in restitution to those victims. Those victims potentially have causes of action to sue in cases like that. And you can go after example after example after example. So I understand why people might be cynical or might be pessimistic in this moment, but there's actually an enormous amount of tools that we have at our disposal. We just need to use them.

[Nilay Patel]

This feels like an excellent transition into the book. A lot of what's happened with arbitration is a reaction to the perceived explosion in litigation in the 70s and 80s. You talk about this very directly in your book. The idea that there's a bunch of dormant power that state attorneys general should use or that private plaintiffs should use has. It's dormant for a reason. We just haven't seen it happen. And you're saying, hey, we should bring this back. And actually the rise of arbitration agreements stands in your way as a citizen of the United States to get the relief that you might deserve that the federal government or even the state governments might not be pursuing for you. How do you think about that dynamic and why did you end up starting with arbitration specifically?

[Brendan Ballew]

There's a bunch of things there, so I'll try not to go on too long, but a couple of things.

[Nilay Patel]

Read your book to me, Brennan.

[Brendan Ballew]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Let's start with the why and then get into arbitration and then why it's bad. And then maybe we can get into the history here. So, you know, I'm a practicing lawyer. I wrote, you know, we had the got to talk a few years ago about my first book about private equity. You know, as I was sort of doing follow up work from that, and just in my own practice, I got the sense that I think most people feel that the legal system is profoundly stacked against them and really, you know, organized to benefit the rich, you know, whether it's rich individuals or big corporations. And I wanted to explain to folks at a very practical level that I think they're, by and large, they are right, but to do it in a very specific instance so that people understood very directly how the legal system has changed over the past four decades or so to really benefit large companies. And in a literal sense, not a figurative sense, in a literal sense, put them beyond the reach of the law. And I figured that if I could explain that in the specific context of forced arbitration, it would both anger people and get them mad about our current system, but also help them understand how this has happened and also how we might change things for the better. So that that was the initial motivation. If I can just add on to that sort of what we're actually talking about here with forced arbitration, because I think it's a term that many people have heard, and it's certainly something that is affecting your life right now, but it's something that I think a lot of people don't actually know what it is. So just to set a baseline here, forced arbitration is a private alternative to the justice system. So you know, if you are harmed by a company, you know if you are cheated, if you were discriminated against, if a family member of yours is hurt or even killed, by and large, you've probably signed an agreement with that company saying that you cannot sue them for that harm in court. Instead, you have to go to a private justice system where the judge called an arbitrator is paid for typically or many times by the company that you're trying to sue. And as you can imagine, when a judge is paid for by one party, all the incentives are for them to rule for that party. And the statistics bear that out. And so Whereas consumers win 89% of the time in small claims court, they win 20 to 30% of the time in forced arbitration when they represent themselves without a lawyer, it might be less than 10%. Before one arbitration company, it was 0.2%. So a 2 in 1,000 chance of winning. So it's a system of justice that is profoundly stacked towards big companies. And it's one that we are all, whether we realize it or not, a part of.

[Nilay Patel]

One of the most striking stories in your book is the poor man whose wife died at Disney park and Disney tried to move him to arbitration because he had signed up for Disney Plus. Explain what happened there.

[Brendan Ballew]

Jeffrey Piccolo and his wife went to Disney World. His wife was a doctor, had severe allergies, and so they were trying to be very careful about where they ate. According to his subsequent legal complaint, they went to this faux Irish pub. They were assured that the food was safe. In fact, was not her. His wife wife died of anaphylactic shock. But when he tried to sue Disney for wrongful death, Disney tried to compel him into forced arbitration by saying that he had consented to it when he signed up for his Disney plus account several years prior. And I think it's, you know, kind of extraordinary for folks to imagine that, you know, by signing up for a streaming service, you could essentially sign away your right to sue over your wife's death. But to be clear, the law was very much on Disney's side, and they would have won, I think, because of enormous public pressure. They eventually backed down, but they would have won if they continued. And we actually give. The next example that we gave was about a woman who worked on a cruise ship who was allegedly raped by a co worker. She tried to sue the cruise ship for having this. This enormously unsafe work environment. She was compelled into arbitration and compelled to arbitrate in the Philippines, which was her own, her home country. We obviously never knew the outcome of that arbitration because arbitration is almost always kept secret. So it's a system that really does bind us all.

[Nilay Patel]

There's an aspect of this where it's just so obviously unfair for the regular consumer or the regular employee. And the courts have consistently looked at that and said, yeah, that's fine, but you signed up like you signed up for Disney Plus.

[Brendan Ballew]

You.

[Nilay Patel]

You entered into this contract. It. It occurred. You. You scrolled to the bottom and you hit, I accept, and now your life has been signed away. Why does that keep happening? Because to me, the idea that the formal justice system, the, you know, the system where you go to open court, you make your case and there's a jury, that thing should be very protective of its outcomes. Right. That system should say, actually, we decide, and big corporations evading our authority is bad. And I don't know why they're not more protective of that authority.

[Brendan Ballew]

Yeah. And it's interesting because when you describe stories of forced arbitration, I think sometimes people often think that you're just making it up because it sounds so lopsided. You know, there are stories of people being compelled into arbitration and then can't escape even when their arbitrator is exhibiting signs of senility or falling asleep during their arbitration. And yet their decisions are still confirmed in, actually cannot be appealed in court. So why would real judges sign off on a system like this? Well, by and large, they're taking their cue from the Supreme Court, which, beginning in the 1980s, really fell in love with forced arbitration. There was this idea that there was this explosion of litigation that was costing big companies millions or billions of dollars, and there needed to be some way to get consumers and employees out of court, and forced arbitration was the way to do that. So the conservative justices, beginning with Warren Berger, but then Antonin Scalia, John Roberts and so forth took this little law from 1925 called the Federal Arbitration act, which was meant to really allow sophisticated companies and merchants to bind themselves into arbitration so they didn't have to go through the headache of going to court and said, we're actually going to take this law, which is meant for sophisticated parties of roughly equal bargaining power, and we're going to extend it to employees and to consumers, and we're going to extend it to the kinds of contracts that you just mentioned, the sort of click to accept, take it or leave it contracts that we sign every day with companies. That was never the intention of the statute, and it really wasn't supported by the text of the statute either. But I think the conservative justices really saw this as a vehicle to keep certain people and certain kinds of cases out of court, and they were enormously successful in that endeavor.

[Nilay Patel]

We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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[Nilay Patel]

Foreign. Welcome back.

I'm talking with Brendan Ballou. Before the break, Brendan explained what forced arbitration is and why it's bad. That led us to the rose gallery of conservative Supreme Court justices who have spent decades making it possible.

I'm smiling because you devote a chapter each to these judges, these characters who have pushed us towards arbitration in this way. And maybe the most important, you can disagree. It is a chapter which is Antonin Scalia, who is the most famous textualist in, like, legal history, and he's reading well beyond the law. How did that happen with Scalia specifically?

[Brendan Ballew]

I'm very critical of Scalia, but I always try to give credit, which is like far and away, he is the most fun Supreme Court justice we've had a long time. He seemed to have a real love of life. There's this very evocative picture description of him typing his opinions on an old computer while drinking black coffee and smoking Marlboro cigarettes and listening to Bach. I mean, it's kind of hard not to be charmed by a guy like that.

[Nilay Patel]

He's funny. Like, the opinions are funny. There's nothing. You can't say anything else about it. They're funny.

[Brendan Ballew]

Exactly. So it's like, I want to both acknowledge that and then also say that the decisions that he had around forced arbitration have had profoundly damaging effects for most consumers and employees. So one of the key purposes of forced arbitration is to kill class actions. So, you know, class action is when everybody's hurt in the same kind of way. You can bring one lawsuit instead of hundreds or thousands or millions of lawsuits. And, you know, much, if not most of our social progress on the courts has come through class action. So Roe v. Wade was a class action. Brown v. Board of Education was a class action. And then in the consumer and employee context, you know, you have cases, for instance, of, you know, women who are dying of cancer because of defective birth control. Those are cases. Broadest class actions, or people whose family members all die in a plane crash. Broadest class actions, forced arbitration kills this system by requiring people into arbitration and to arbitrate their cases individually. So each person has to bring an individual case, and you can immediately imagine for anything other than the most expensive harms that makes pursuing a case completely unaffordable. So you think about all those little fees that a bank might have on your bank statement or your cell phone company has, and you're like, why am I getting charged $30 a month for this? This seems like BS it may well be, but there is no effective way for you to resolve that because you're forced into individual arbitration. You can't join a class action over that $30 fee. All that is because of AntonInSkaling. So he issued an incredibly important decision in 2011 called Concepcion that said that, you know, however. And this is a legal term, however, quote, unquote unconscionable. A contract like that may seem so unfair and lopsided to employees and to consumers. Federal courts would still enforce those agreements. And there was nothing that a court could do to say, you know, this is so unfair. We're not going to allow this. And that was really because of Scalia.

[Nilay Patel]

What led him to that result?

[Brendan Ballew]

You know, I don't want to psychologize too much, but I think if you look at his judicial work, with the exception of some limited stuff in criminal justice, I think he was always an advocate for the powerful in pretty much any sort of dispute. He was absolutely an advocate for expansive presidential power, expansive corporate power, and so forth. And so Oftentimes he's lauded as this textualist, this idea that somebody whose ultimate fidelity is to the text of the law, to the Constitution. And in some cases, he was. But when textualism or originalism ran up against, you know, by and large, ruling for corporate interests, he almost always dropped the textualism and. And ruled for the corporations. And I think it's really interesting. Again, one of the things that I really admire about, about Justice Scalia is I think he is one of the best writers that's ever been on the court. He has very evocative writing that's very easy to follow. But on a lot of these decisions, the actual reasoning, it's kind of incoherent because he really had an outcome in mind. And so he was trying to figure out a way to get to it. And you see in the dissents from those times, sort of pointing out like, this decision doesn't make sense. But time and time again, he was able to rule for the employer, for the company that was being sued by consumers.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for that. My entire career is masking poor reasoning with jokes.

[Brendan Ballew]

Yeah, don't we all? Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

The reason I bring that up and I ask about it in that way is that, you know, Scalia was writing before pervasive terms of service agreements, right? He was writing before pervasive arbitration. He was writing before a pretty unhappy American public staring at tech companies, saying, no, we can just take whatever we want to make. AI Right. Like, something has shifted in the public, in the perception of big tech. Whatever. You want to say that it's. It's an angrier country, it's a more unhappy country. The people feel more excited, exploited. And Scalia would have had to open up his Mac and click 10,000 Terms of Service agreements. And it just feels like something has changed, like, any justice today. And maybe they're all still in bubbles in the ivory tower, and they don't experience what regular people experience, but everyone else feels it. And to just participate in society, you're. You're agreeing to 10,000 contracts every day that, that you, you definitely don't read the legal fiction that anyone has actually read. These contracts is like, the foundation of the American economy. It feels like we should maybe look at that more thoroughly. No one can negotiate them. And then they change all the time and all of that. You know, I'm just thinking back to my law school education. Like, oh, those are just unconscionable contracts. Like, those are contracts of adhesion. Like, to. To literally use my phone I'm. I've entered into some agreement with Apple that no one can negotiate. That seems ridiculous to me. And to participate in society, I must use my phone. So now there's a secondary legal system that is mediating my relationship to the country and the world. And literally no one can look at it. Do you think that that is going to change? Because it doesn't seem that tenable to me.

[Brendan Ballew]

I don't think it's going to change at the Supreme Court, not with a change in personnel. You know, I'm referencing some studies that are a little old now, but you know, if you look at actually how the Supreme Court has rul for corporations, I believe that this is the most pro corporate Supreme Court at least since the 19th century. So I think the Supreme Court rules for the Chamber of Commerce somewhere in the order of 80, 80% of the time or higher. This was before Justice Jackson joined the court. But as I recall, Justice Sotomayor was previously the most anti corporate justice on the court, and even her decisions were 50% for the chamber of Commerce. We live in an era where the Supreme Court in particular is just enormously deferential to corporations. I think that's probably for at least two reasons. One is, you know, getting appointed to the Supreme Court has now become a multimillion dollar operation. So, you know, a single donor gave $17 million to help get Justice Kavanaugh appointed to the court. Similar numbers for Justice Gorsuch and so forth. And so, you know, if you have that kind of money that's necessary to put somebody on the court court, chances are the person that's going to get put on the court is pretty sympathetic to the people with that kind of money. I also think that there's something about the nature of Supreme Court litigation itself that has changed, which is the Supreme Court has become much more insular over the past several decades. So back in the day, the people that were arguing cases in the Supreme Court were by and large the people that started the cases in the district court in whatever state they happen to be in now. I think it's 20 lawyers and clinics now are responsible for arguing something like, like 50% of all cases before the Supreme Court. And by and large, those lawyers represent large corporate interests. And so, you know, the folks that are most successful and most liked by the justices, by and large are the ones telling them a sort of pro corporate story. So I don't think that there's really going to be a change at the Supreme Court level, but I do believe that there is going to be change nationally for exactly the reasons that you're talking about. I think that there's widespread dissatisfaction with corporate power right now. I think it's. I think it is the very rare person that feels that corporations have too little power in America. So I think that there's going to be a lot of change. But I think change is by and large going to happen at the state and local level rather than at least in the Supreme Court or in Congress.

[Nilay Patel]

This is the sort of the last third of your book. How do you fix it? And you lay out a few ways of fixing it and getting people away from the coercion of forced arbitration agreements. The first thing you could do is you could just fix arbitration itself. What would that look like?

[Brendan Ballew]

One of the reasons that I think corporations are so attracted to forced arbitration is it's unlike a regular court. So in regular court, court happens out and opens that people know that it's not corrupt. Decisions are written down so that, you know, people who have similar cases can reference those and be treated similarly. And if the judge makes a mistake, that decision can get appealed. None of those things are necessarily true in arbitration, which generally occurs in sequen secret. Oftentimes decisions are written down. In fact, sometimes companies contract that they specifically aren't. And ironically, it's actually much harder to appeal an arbitrator's decision than it is to appeal a real judge's decision. So there are ways that we can make arbitration more fair. By requiring certain disclosures, by allowing procedural fairness so that plaintiffs can actually get your lawyer, what we call discovery from the other side, and allow or require decisions to actually be written down and shared. We can also require arbitration companies to actually share the statistics on how arbitrators rule. One of the advantages that companies have is you and I are probably going to arbitrate one case in our life. A company might arbitrate dozens or hundreds of thousands, and so they know which arbitrators to pick and we don't. But by requiring actual disclosure on how arbitrators rule on things, you actually have a better chance of picking one that's going to be fair to you. So all those may sound like incremental fundamental changes, but I will say the more that arbitration can become like a regular court, both arbitration itself will become fairer and companies will become less attracted to it because they're specifically attracted to it right now because it's not like court.

[Nilay Patel]

There are some states that have tried to do all this. Is it effective?

[Brendan Ballew]

Yeah, California has made a lot of progress on this. You know, one of the biggest changes that they've made is not just making arbitration fairer, but actually finding ways to get people out of arbitration in the first place.

[Nilay Patel]

Place.

[Brendan Ballew]

And there's this law called the Private Attorneys General act, paga, and it's really smart. So what it says is if you're an employee that's, you know, been harmed by your company, you didn't get the wages you were deserved, you were discriminated against or whatever it happens to be, and you sign an arbitration agreement, normally that's too bad, you can't sue your company. But we're going to say to you, employee, that you can represent us, the state, which can enforce all these same laws in the state labor department, and you're representing us in a lawsuit against the company. And if you win, the state will get a cut and you'll get the rest. But what's so clever about that is while you're bound by an arbitration agreement, the state is not. And so it's effectively a way to circumvent arbitration agreements. Now that's great for employment law, and I think it has made California employees much better treated than a lot of other states. We need to expand that sort of legislation to all sorts of laws, to consumer protection laws, securities and anti fraud laws, antitrust and so forth. If we can do that, then we can narrow down arbitration to become a much smaller part of our lives and companies are going to treat us better.

[Nilay Patel]

Can I just ask why that? I mean, obviously you were a federal prosecutor in a previous life. There's a part of me that says our approach to the American legal system right now generally is like a series of hacks and magic words. Like we can't just go and do the policy issue. We have to be like, I deputize you to be a state attorney general to escape the contract that you signed. And now, now the state will get a cut of your private litigation. And we've just created a whole other set of weird policy problems instead of just solving the policy problem. Why does that keep happening?

[Brendan Ballew]

Well, you keep employing lawyers, and that's something that we do. Yeah. So no, I think you're exactly right that we. I think we have a lot of sort of odd hacks to deal with, some sort of structural injustices in our legal system that are hard to solve. You know, so much of, you know, the workarounds that we've been having about, you know, trying to come up with new regulations at the federal level is because it's become so incre. Hard to pass legislation in Congress. You know, the reason why we're having to do so many things at the state level right now is because the Supreme Court has been so adverse to progressive change at the federal level and so forth. So I definitely think that we have to have these sort of awkward workarounds. I will say, though, that, you know, awkward workarounds have been a fact of human existence. And, you know, as profoundly unfair in many ways as our legal system is, and probably, probably more unfair than it was a few decades ago, it is vastly better than what we had 60 years ago when we had effectively had an apartheid state in the United States or 100 years ago during the Gilded Age, when we are interpreting our antitrust laws to break up unions, but not corporations and so forth. So maybe I'm just too captured by my own profession, but I sort of see it as a cost of doing business in any sort of human society where we're all flawed. Flawed.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I think I just, I, I look at it from, I don't know, maybe I just want the system to be more elegant.

[Brendan Ballew]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

And I.

[Brendan Ballew]

That's your Silicon Valley background. Yeah, yeah, right.

[Nilay Patel]

That's just. I'm a tech person. I'm like, this computer makes no sense. Like, you should make a different, better computer. You know, I think terms of service agreements should be illegal. Like, fundamentally, I think they are unconscionable contracts. I think you can point to forcing people into arbitration is one element of them being unconscionable. You can point to just the fact that no one can negotiate them, and the bald truth that literally no one reads them is a problem. Like, I think it is bad that a huge amount of the American economy is predicated on no one reading the contract at scale. Like, you should probably fix that problem in some way. And if you take a step back and you, at least for me, it's like, how would you fix that problem? Well, the state which represents all of us should negotiate the contract. It should write a privacy law.

[Brendan Ballew]

Yeah, right.

[Nilay Patel]

And that should be the foundation of whatever contract comes next. But it should pre negotiate the floor. And we, as you point out, maybe Congress seems incapable of pre negotiating the floor.

[Brendan Ballew]

Yeah. You know, and, and maybe I'm taking this in, in an odd direction, but I, I think you're exactly right. And in a lot of ways, our governments made that literally harder to do. Like, back in the 90s, Montana passed a law to try to make it. If you had an arbitration agreement in your contract, contractually, you had to put it on the first page, you had to notify people that you had an ar, that very straightforward law got struck down by the Supreme Court and said that was actually discriminating, ironically against arbitration agreements. So, you know, there's a lot of impediments to those sorts of things. And I think you're exactly right that, you know, sort of at a high level, I think this is, these are the responsibilities, as you say, of, you know, democracy to resolve a lot of these issues. I will say sometimes I think talking sort of at a high level of generality can be paralyzing in its own way. Because when you talk about sort of how everything in its own way is broken, it sort of makes it impossible to fix it. It's like if you're depressed and you're looking at your apartment, it's in a mess. You're like, I can't do anything about it. Whereas if you think like, okay, I'm going to focus on the kitchen right now and start doing that, it becomes a much more solvable problem. Which is sort of why I chose to focus on this seemingly fairly technical issue of forced arbitration. Because I thought if I get people to focus on this thing specific, I thought it would help them understand both sort of how things get broken, but also like, here's how we can fix this one specific thing. And I think that actually can be kind of empowering for people.

[Nilay Patel]

We're going to pause here for another short break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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[Nilay Patel]

Welcome back. I'm talking with Brendan Ballew about forced arbitration. We've been discussing how, as a system, it's fundamentally unfair for consumers, which is to say basically everyone. And that raises an obvious question, what can we do about it?

The reason I talked about hacks and magic words is, yeah, we can try to go through the front door and fix it with state laws that tweak arbitration. And then your proposal is like, we should just break the system. We should just do mass arbitration and cost these companies a lot of money and make that entire operation just untenable. Explain what you mean by breaking arbitration.

[Brendan Ballew]

This was, you know, you're talking about hacks. This was a fascinating one. So, you know, arbitration, you know, like you said, is meant to kill class action so that, you know, each person has to bring a case individually. It's too expensive for each person to do it, so nobody ever does it. One thing that the arbitrary that the companies who were doing this just messed up on is in order to make these agreements seem facially a little more fair, they said, we're going to pay for the initial cost of the arbitration. We'll even pay for the arbitrator. You know, you just have to start the arbitration. And some very smart lawyers said, okay, we're going to take you, take you up on your offer, and we are going to initiate thousands of arbitrations all at once, and you have to pay for all of them all at once. It's clear that the company's just never even considered the possibility that a lot of people would arbitrate their cases because as soon as they did, they tried to back out of their own agreements and said, we actually don't think we should pay these tens of millions of dollars that we promised to pay. There were some very funny court decisions where judges who had been watching their powers slip away and consumers powers slip away through arbitration say, it is sort of the height of irony that these companies are now trying to escape these things and compelled them them to pay these costs. So mass arbitration is really a way to turn arbitration on its head and actually say, okay, companies, if you're going to force us to do this, we're actually going to do it, but you're going to have to pay a bunch of costs, which creates leverage for consumers and employees. I will say I think that's great. And in some ways, mass arbitration can actually be very helpful for certain kinds of cases. For a year, I was involved in a mass arbitration representing employees who had been illegally sued by Elon Musk at Twitter, and Shannon Eliz Reardon, who's just a fabulous attorney, was leading that whole effort. But companies are trying to get smart and figure out ways to avoid paying any money or moving to even less reputable arbitration providers that have rules that are so skewed rules that sometimes the companies even helped write to try to kill these mass arbitrations.

[Nilay Patel]

Tell me the story of suing Elon Musk on Twitter.

[Brendan Ballew]

It was fascinating, and there are certain limitations of what I can Talk about again, Shannon and her team were the real heroes on this. But it was fascinating because Elon Musk summarily fired 2,000 employees and did, you know, had clearly promised severance that he refused to pay. And you know, these employees had unfortunately signed arbitration agreements which prohibit, by and large prohibited them from being class actions. And so Shannon, the team I was part of it, decided to say, okay, we're actually going to represent these hundreds or thousands of employees in individually arbitrary rate. Can't get into the details, but I think that we had enormous success and I hope Elon Musk doesn't make the same mistake twice.

[Nilay Patel]

Can you not get in the details because the arbitration agreements keep you from talking about the details.

[Brendan Ballew]

I don't know if it's the specific arbitration agreements, but being a lawyer in general, sometimes when you're doing these cases you have to be kind of cagey about things.

[Nilay Patel]

It does seem like Elon, he just doesn't want to pay the money and now he's like rolling up all of his companies. He might IPO SpaceX in some way somehow. Twitter is now part of SpaceX. It's all very confusing. Did that all just wrap up because he needed it to go away?

[Brendan Ballew]

You know, it does seem like he's, he's sort of rebuilding the sort of like Korean conglomerates that you see going on where you have, you know, a single family running, you know, 18 different kinds of businesses, often supporting each other, you know, financially or you know, the Japanese, what is it, Koretsu sort of banking conglomerates that you have those. Koretsu collapsed in the 1990s and Japan's had a multi decade recession as a result. So I'm not sure Elon Musk is necessarily going to do better than that. But speaking personally, I am enormously skeptical of Elon Musk's financial acumen.

[Nilay Patel]

I feel like I should have you back just so we can talk about weird Korean cable corruption scandals, including the Samson family and the horse racing thing. That's a different accent.

[Brendan Ballew]

Grow your audience, not shrink it.

[Nilay Patel]

But yeah, mass arbitration, the idea of idea that, you know, you can cost these companies an enormous sum of money just by making them enforce your own agreements, they are pushing back against it. Right. There's some instances where, I don't know, Val, the video game company took their operation cause out of its agreement because of mass arbitration. And then there's bank of America, which changed its user agreement but forces individual arbitration. And that's going to go into effect I think the week after we're talking it's coming. Is that going to be effective? Is it going to push back on the idea that you can, you can hack the system this way?

[Brendan Ballew]

At the beginning of mass arbitration, it was easy because the companies just hadn't considered the possibility and so were completely caught off guard and had committed to paying millions of dollars to consumers that if they had been strategic, would not have done. The challenge that you've got is that there are what are called arbitration companies. AAA and JAMS are the two largest ones that actually provide the arbitrators for these companies. They are business businesses and are in the business of providing arbitration. And so the rules of the game that they set, they are naturally inclined, whether they would admit it or not. You know, they have a natural incentive to make the rules favorable to the companies that are actually paying for arbitration and that are the repeat players in these sorts of things. So there is a natural incentive for these guys to make arbitration ever less fair for consumers and employees. Which I think, think to your point about the power of the state is just one more reason why we need democracy to constrain forced arbitration as an institution in general.

[Nilay Patel]

Ian, it's funny you brought up the AAA. We just had Bridget McCormack, who's the chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, she's now the CEO of the American Arbitration Association. We talked about this kind of at length, right? Her proposal was we should just have AI do it. Like there's some set of arbitration between construction firms. This is where they're starting. It's documents only construction cases. And she was like, you don't need an arbitrator. Like, these are actually both sophisticated parties. They both show up in front of us all the time. All the cases can be resolved on the nature of the contracts and whatever delivery invoice was late or on time or whatever, and the AI can just do it and that is perceived as more fair and they can just move on with their lives. There's something to that, right? If you perceive the entire justice system to already be so unfair, at least ChatGPT is going to listen to you. You can just talk to it until it, it gives in and says, I've issued a ruling and there's some data saying that people will perceive that to be more fair because they were at least listened to. That does feel like the next turn, right? You open your Verizon app and you're like, I didn't get service today. I'm arbitrating my, my bill for the month. And some combination of arbitration and customer support merges into a chatbot and delivers you an outcome that seems very bad. It also seems like where all of these companies want to go. What does that look like to you?

[Brendan Ballew]

Speaking personally? It's horrifying. I think there are, you know, I don't want to be a Luddite about these things. And, you know, I use, I think AI can be very useful for certain parts of legal work, document review and so forth. I think that there are two problems here. One at very high level is, you know, when you're talking about dispute resolution, you know, lawyers are one paid to understand the individual nuances of each case rather than sort of the generalities. And I have often found that sort of AI bots have been very ineffective at actually writing sophisticated legal briefs that are specific to a case because they can write sort of the generic section about what the legal standard is and so forth, but actually understanding the nuances of the case, it's more than just a matter of natural language processing. But even if they were perfect at it, I think for a justice system to work, people need to be bought into its legitimacy. And I think it's very hard to buy into the legitimacy of a large language model that's essentially a black box. How can people possibly believe that it was ultimately fair? I'll also say, just at a more practical, technical level, one of the challenges we alluded to this earlier that you have with forced arbitration is that decisions often aren't written down, or if they are written down, they're not made public. And the reason why that's so important in a functioning legal system, it's actually kind of the key to a legal system is that similar cases get treated similarly. That's what justice is. And when decisions aren't made public, public, it's actually literally impossible to come up, you know, to actually create a case law upon which people can make decisions. And so the way that arbitration is currently structured, even if in every other respect it was fair, if you have an AI that has no corpus of case law to rely on, the decisions are going to be ultimately arbitrary and case dependent and have no internal consistency.

[Nilay Patel]

When I think about that, there's so much about AI and LLMs in the ether that is related to dynamic outcomes, right? You're going to talk to the system and the system will understand you and something will happen for you that maybe isn't happening for someone else. Uber CEO was just on the show and they're redoing all of their actual customer support to deliver dynamic outcomes. And instead of having written policies, they're basically just going to tell the AI, like here are the vibes we want customers to feel. And I asked them like you're going to back into having policies because you, you still want the perception of being fair. And right next to that is all these companies instituting dynamic pricing, which is fundamentally unfair. And right next to that is they're all signing up for forced arbitration agreements where the outcomes can be totally arbitrary and you will never know if your case was resolved next to next case. And when you say justice is about like the same set of facts having the same outcomes, it feels like that's rippling through the entire experience of being an American in right now that you can be treated differently in almost every case, in every interaction in some way. Do you think just changing arbitration is like the first step towards being like, actually we need to treat people more fairly, we need to equalize the outcomes instead of it every case saying, oh like you have a credit card that's tied to this airline. We can see your spending, your price is going to be up for this route, which is just, we're barreling towards that every single day.

[Brendan Ballew]

That's a really profound question. And I had, I've never really thought about it though. I thank you for asking that. I certainly think at a practical level, forced arbitration, ending forced arbitration or constraining forced arbitration can help solve that. When you talk about the problems that dynamic pricing or the sort of personalization that an Uber CEO is promising, maybe even with the best of intentions, is likely going to create violate a whole bunch of laws. So you can imagine a world in which which otherwise well intentioned dynamic pricing dramatically discriminates against people based on their race or dynamic hiring practices, ends up discriminating in making job offers and so forth, dramatically discriminates against people based on their gender. So I think that this sort of attempt at personalization, intentionally or not, is probably going to violate a whole bunch of laws. And unless we constrain forced arbitration, it is going to be very hard for anybody to anybody to challenge those. I do think in a sense, you know, the sort of arbitrariness that we're all experiencing, I really like the way that you've put it, can in some ways be chalked up to forced arbitration. I don't want to sort of over promise this one sort of thing, but maybe it's part of a larger story in that as so much of our societal disputes sort of get channeled outside of, of the public justice system and we don't have the development of the body of law. And we don't have sort of public discussion of these issues.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[Brendan Ballew]

I do think we grow sort of increasingly Balkanized and isolated and, you know, sort of at a certain level, sort of definitionally, what we are as a society begins to fray.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, now we're. Now we're deep into my own feelings. So just. I apologize for. Please go with me for one second. I have always thought that what the Verge sells to people is a sense of hope. Like, we cover people who make things, and we cover companies who build really remarkable things, and then people use those things to build new things. Like, it's just the cycle of what a tech magazine is like, fundamentally. We're like, here's some new stuff. Do you like it? And then people say, now I can make a different kind of music than ever existed before. And that is very fun. And lately I've sensed just an overwhelming kind of nihilism from our audience, particularly our young audience. And I. I relate it very much to a feeling of powerlessness, and I relate that feeling of powerlessness directly to arbitrary outcomes.

[Brendan Ballew]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

We started by talking about corruption, Right. And what is corruption except you're rich, so you don't have. The justice system won't touch you, or you can spend enough money to make the DOJ go away? And I, you know, maybe it's a. Maybe forced. Putting it all in forced arbitration is too much. Maybe you can't bear all the weight, but there's some part of it where it's like, where do you begin? Begin? How do you escape the sense that everything is arbitrary and actually the system should be more fair, and maybe the system should be more elegant, but maybe we actually just have to do a bunch of hacks to make it more fair.

[Brendan Ballew]

No, that's. That's a really deep sentiment, and I both understand it and don't agree with it, because I taught a class at Stanford last year on January 6, and talking to young students about, like, the current political moment, and both. And it was. Was very unsettling, both how deeply young students were thinking about so many of these issues and at the same time, how scared they were to act on them. Not just because the problem seemed so large that it was paralyzing, but because they were literally worried about getting doxed or losing their job outside of college or law school or whatever it happened to be if they said the wrong thing. And so I completely understand sort of the people's sense of sort of overwhelming despair and nihilism. I will say, you know, I am not particularly despairing I'm not particularly nihilistic in large part because of the work that I do. So I am fortunate in that I get to talk to a lot of people who have done one specific thing, which is they have chosen a issue that they care about and then they stick with it for several years. And I over and over again, this happens to me about every six to nine months. I'm astounded by the amount of change that one person has had had on a specific issue just because they stuck with it for one year or three years or 20 years or whatever it happens to be. You know, I watched a handful of people completely change the prison phone industry. I watched a handful of people, like, make mobile housing in their communities dramatically more fair. And so, you know, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier in our discussion. Whereas I think when, when your viewers and when your listeners and when your readers sort of see things in the macro, I completely understand how despairing it is, is. But I will say I, I remain incredibly hopeful about the power of individual people if they stick with something to make progress, because I have seen it happen over and over and over again.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, Brennan, I think that's as, as good of a place to end it as I can think of. How should people think about escaping arbitration now? How should people think about taking more control over this one aspect of things?

[Brendan Ballew]

You're not going to escape it by reading your contracts more carefully because most of them aren't negotiable and Verizon's not going to let you negotiate, initiate them. So we're not going to ethically consume our way out of this problem. This is, to your earlier point, something we are going to solve collectively. Ultimately, that's going to happen in city councils and state legislatures. I worked with a young, very smart University of Chicago law student to draft some model legislation. I have a personal website, brendanballew.com, where you can download it, send it to your legislator and get them starting to pass some laws. So I think that is the practical way that we're going to make progress, progress here.

[Nilay Patel]

The book is called When Companies are on the Courts. It's a great read. The previous book was called Plunder about private equity. Still comes up on decoder all the time. I recommend that one as well. Brandon, we'd have to have you back and we'll just do more therapy. For me personally, thank you so much for being on decoder.

[Brendan Ballew]

Thank you.

[Nilay Patel]

I'd like to thank Brendan Ballou for taking time to join me on Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all. Drop us a line. You can email us at decoder@the verge.com we really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Bluesky. Decoder's on YouTube. It's Decoder Pod. It's also on TikTok and Instagram at the same handle. Those channels are a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share with your friends and subscribe over to your podcasts. Decoder is production on the Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Stadt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. Our Editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder Music is by Break Master Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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