Do Foreign Service Providers Simply Ignore the EU Consumer Law? An Empirical Study of 100 Online Terms of Service

Abstract This article reports the results of an empirical study conducted on 100 online terms of services offered in the EU. It documents the prevalence of (potentially) unfair clauses in these contracts and discusses the outcomes of the inferential statistical analysis performed to discover any patterns of this widespread incompliance. It shows that contracts accompanying services with the main headquarters outside of the EU are significantly more likely to contain unfair terms than those originating from the EU. The article offers several possible explanations of this phenomenon, including the features of the corporations and the particularities of the European consumer law enforcement structure. Based on these findings, we offer several possible policy interventions. These include closer scrutiny of corporations from outside the Union, operationalisation of the tools for automated detection of unfair clauses, and potential legal reform, including the possibility of leveraging the enforcement structure put in place by the Digital Services Act.