More than once Dr. Boli has pointed out that agreements to which we did not agree have made slaves of us. No normal person (to give one obvious example) would agree that the details of her sexual activity could be sold to any third party who hands over a few pennies; yet, if you have ever accepted a ride in a friend’s car, you may have legally made just that “agreement,” depending on who made the car. You didn’t know? Well, neither did your friend, because that clause was buried among thousands of words that she never read. But there was also a clause making it your friend’s responsibility to inform her passengers that all the terms and conditions applied to them as well, so it’s not the car’s fault that you didn’t know, is it?

Now, obviously, if you have lost control of the most intimate and closely guarded aspects of your life to a corporation, you are the slave of that corporation. And here is where you might expect Dr. Boli to wax eloquent, or at least sarcastic, on the evil intentions of big corporations. But that is not going to happen. It is certainly true that some corporations have evil intentions. Corporations are people, too (says the Supreme Court); and some people are good and some less resistant to temptation. But terms and conditions are not imposed on us primarily because corporations are evil. They are imposed because corporations are afraid.

What are they afraid of? Aside from big hairy spiders, of course?

Their fears are very reasonable. They worry constantly that they will be held liable for millions of dollars in damages because of some ordinary and necessary aspect of their business.

For example, you set up a photo-sharing site where people can upload pictures and share them with their friends. How delightful! Now someone is suing you for copyright infringement because you have his copyrighted pictures stored on your server—even though he uploaded them to your server himself. “Did you have written permission to store those copyrighted pictures?” attorney for the plaintiff asks in court. Well, no, not really.

You should have had some terms and conditions. And you should have had them written by a lawyer, who would have the expertise to think of all the unlikely but possible ways other lawyers might try to exploit the courts against you.

So the other companies in your business, having watched your downfall with alarm, do just that. And so do you, if you have the good luck to emerge from bankruptcy and try again. And the more your lawyers think—or, in other words, the better they are at their job—the more the terms and conditions pile up into tens of thousands of words. Now, a site like yours needs at least thousands if not millions of users in order to make a profit; you simply cannot negotiate an agreement with each one of them individually. And you quickly discover that most prospective users will just go somewhere else if you make them e-sign a bunch of documents before they can interact with your site. So you make the terms and conditions apply to everyone who uses the site, just by using the site—and the courts, realizing that modern business would be impossible without these “agreements,” go along with it.

Make a few assumptions, draw the obvious conclusions, and modern slavery is the inevitable result. It is quite impossible for you to know the terms of all the “agreements” you have accepted, but it is just as impossible for businesses to offer you their services without those terms and conditions.

Are we trapped, then? No! Dr. Boli has a pair of sharp shears (labeled for metaphorical use only) that will cut through this Gordian knot. The lawyers won’t like it, because it will eliminate nine parts in ten of their work, but if the consumers will get behind it, the corporations will have to deal with it.

The proposal begins with an observation: every business in each category has the same legal problems to face. Your business may have a few unique aspects, but the great majority of your legal fears are the same as the legal fears of all the other players in your field.

Why, then, should you not all use the same terms and conditions?

Right now, if you run a photo-sharing site, you have your own set of terms and conditions, and your own privacy policy, and so on. The competition has a different set of terms and conditions, but they address the same problems. That is, at the very least, inefficient; and from the point of view of the user, it is impossible. No one can read a separate set of legal conditions for every site on the Web.

Open-source software programmers have dealt with this problem in a very reasonable way. Instead of making a new set of terms and conditions for every bit of software they release, they pick one of a handful of well-known licenses. If you install software licensed under the MIT license, you can say, “Oh, I’ve seen this a dozen times before,” and you know what you’re getting into.

What we need is a similar way to consolidate everyone’s terms and conditions. It is impossible to read separate terms and conditions for every car you ride in, every app you download, every Web site you visit, every appliance you buy, every wi-fi hotspot you connect to. But it would be reasonable to read a short document called “Universal Wi-Fi Hotspot Terms” once, and then know that, whenever you saw the UWFHT logo, you could confidently agree to the terms you had already read and understood.

It is the multiplication of separate agreements that enslaves us, not the idea of agreements. Make the agreements few and easy to understand, and balance will be restored to the relationship between businesses and customers. Customers would be well-informed enough to point out the conditions they didn’t like. Corporations would have an incentive to adjust their terms and conditions so that consumers had a good impression of them. The “agreements” would become agreements, without ironical quotation marks.

How would we accomplish that? Govern­ment regulation might work. Better would be a network of trade associations pooling their resources to come up with the most equitable terms and conditions to apply in each industry. Then, of course, businesses that adopted these new universal agreements would have a strong advertising advantage. Buy from the business you trust—the one that’s up front with you—the one whose terms you know in advance—and not from that shady charlatan who hides who knows what wicked chicanery in his nonstandard terms and conditions!

The hardest part of the endeavor would be to get the lawyers on our side, because we seem to be taking food out of their mouths. But when the mob of attorneys with pitchforks shows up at our door, perhaps we can persuade them that there is a pile of money to be made in suing the corporations that persist in holding customers to nonstandard terms and conditions. As the standard agreements become more usual and expected and are adjusted with experience, they will become more immune to legal assault—but the one-off nonstandard agreements will begin to show their tattered edges and moth holes. Lawyers who can take advantage of those weaknesses will be doing the world a favor, and they may get rich in the bargain.