arbiter
JournalsPricingAccount

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

Przemysław Pałka et al.

Journal of Consumer Policy2025https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-024-09580-zarticle
AJG 2ABDC C
Weight
0.37

What the paper says

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.

1 citation

Open paper page →

Cite this paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-024-09580-z

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{przemysław2025,
  title        = {{Do Foreign Service Providers Simply Ignore the EU Consumer Law? An Empirical Study of 100 Online Terms of Service}},
  author       = {Przemysław Pałka et al.},
  journal      = {Journal of Consumer Policy},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-024-09580-z},
}

Paste directly into BibTeX, Zotero, or your reference manager.

Flag this paper

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

Flags are reviewed by the Arbiter methodology team within 5 business days.

Evidence weight

0.37

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06
M · momentum0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.