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So Uber ToS requires you to accept arbitration, then, when they are found responsible for damages, they still don’t want to pay. Seems pretty shitty for the consumer.
I don't think there's anything to suggest Uber refused to pay the arbitration award? They just stated that they disagreed with the outcome.
(Which is not to say there's not plenty to dislike about this whole case, including the fact it's forced arbitration...)
In that case why is there a "settlement agreement" mentioned that has a $10M penalty for disparagement? Not sure what that refers to exactly but how can Uber (try to) dictate terms in the settlement?
It does seem they're trying to get out of it somehow.
It sounds like they didn't agree to that but anyone can propose a settlement.
Really? Isn't the arbitration binding and therefore the end of the matter?
Looking at a filing by Uber (https://www.panish.law/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Uber-Techn...), and in particular Exhibit 8, the ADR award is confirmed by a settlement agreement (and if no agreement is come to, then a civil action would confirm the terms of the award).
There was a dispute about whether the amount awarded was confidential or not (Uber contended it was; plaintiff contended it wasn't), but on the face of it, had plaintiff agreed to the confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses, Uber would have paid up.
I suppose it could be argued that Uber were trying to write in clauses they knew plaintiff wouldn't agree to, but it's not obvious to me that a different plaintiff wouldn't have agreed to confidentiality and non-disparagement.
(FWIW, it's not clear to me whether Uber have now in fact paid up; they made a statement to the Guardian that _suggests_ they have, but the fact that they didn't explicitly say so means I wouldn't want to draw that inference)
I mean both are right, they made a bullshit filing about something being confidential, in order to negotiate a confidentiality settlement against it.
It's minor, but they are not accepting the award as-is, they are still trying to negotiating, albeit in a minor way, not by contesting the amount, but a confidentiality clause.
They love to negotiate confidentiality clauses, there's few cases without it, including a case by Mike Rafi's personal injury firm which resulted from an omission by Uber (and later Uber being much more anal about confidentiality). I think it's a strategy to avoid case law catching on.
It's a strategy to prevent other arbitrators from recognizing what a death is worth. Now everybody can google the case and adjust payouts accordingly.
Moreso it’s them whining about losing when and trying to add a non-disparagement clause at $10m per event to the settlement for even factual information relating to the case.
Uber were the ones who forced arbitration ostensibly because it often lowers their overall legal and damages bills.
Forced arbitration is creating a parallel legal system where certain companies are excluded from the consequences of their own actions. One might even say they’re becoming a protected class even.
I have been on both sides of arbitration, winning and losing. It’s much better. Basically legislation done right (for civil matters).
The only people who really win from traditional legislation are lawyers (and plaintiffs counsel who use the long expensive process to blackmail people - which is 90% of civil cases)
Did you mean "litigation" rather than "legislation" ?
I thought legislation made a lot of sense:
If you had better laws, arbitration wouldn't be as necessary.
Arbitration can be more efficient, but both parties should have an option to choose it, a direct settlement or public court. The average consumer is denied the choice by using these everyday services that have non-negotiable contracts.
None of the parties should have option to choose it, it should be within govt. justice system, just have arbitration court
Many places have a ‘small claims court’, which is very similar to arbitration. The issue is that class action lawsuits are very profitable for plaintiff lawyers working on contingency, so those are the cases that get brought.
They are very profitable when they win, what is the win rate of class action cases. Also what is the win rate of chosen class action cases versus all potential class action cases.
Measurement matters here.
Small claims is great in that in most states lawyers generally aren't allowed so right out the gate you remove the wealth asymmetry issue. The downside is the dollar amount is very small. I'd like to see small claims limits expanded tbh.
You seem to be missing that arbitrators have a financial incentive to side with the company, which pays them? Explained in this video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787720
I wonder how often this is the case. The one time I read the fine print when signing up for a service, it said that I had the right to disagree with the choice of arbiter, and get some national organization to pick a different arbiter independently.
I don't know how common this is, but yeah, this is a bare minimum that one should have with arbitration.
But, many of the members of that organization make their money from various forced arbitration deals, so that doesn't necessarily move the needle back towards the consumer.
Arbitration is fine. Forced arbitration is not.
They can't force arbitration on you.
If eg Uber runs you over or bumps your car, you have no contractual relationship with them, and thus they can't force arbitration on you.
That's why they have to write the arbitrary clause into their ToS that they need you to agree on. No forced arbitration.
Of course, if you don't agree with the ToS, Uber is also not forced to transport you. But that's fair enough.
I always thought arbitration was forcing weaker parties out of the fairer legal system. Now I wonder if that's a planted idea by the legal industry? It made sense to me that arbitration was paid for by the company, and there would be incentives for the judge to side with their long term meal ticket. But perhaps all that is wrong? I really wish you could elaborate on why it is better, I'm very interested in challenging my assumptions here.
Arbitration is secret. There's no way to determine if it's fair.
Doesn't arbitration avoid setting binding precedent? So even if the consumer wins a case, it's still overall better for the company.
Companies like arbitration because unlike in a civil lawsuit, the plaintiff cannot compel discovery. Paying for an arbitrator is cheaper than going through discovery, especially if the discovery unearths facts materially damaging to the business.
This is simply untrue, and honestly anyone who thinks our legal system does not provide justice needs to go travel the world to see how it really works for 80% of the global population.
All we really need in the US is for arbitration to be optional, you can start with arbitration but if you believe on good merits you have a case and fail arbitration you should have the right to your day in court.
Throwing out our whole legal system because sometimes the lawyers make the most money is reductionist at best.
I don't think you really read the comment. They specifically mentioned it for civil matters
That's 75%+ of all legal cases.
I believe what he's referring to is the cost of the legal system. Lawyers cost money, and if the other party has a lot more money, they can play all kinds of tactics to keep the case going (filing pointless motions, drowning your lawyer with huge amounts of documents, etc).
With arbitration, the arbiter can put an end to those shenanigans really quickly, because they're not legally obligated to allow for that kind of crap.
There are ups and downs to both systems. The benefits are there for parties of roughly equal size. The down side is there is no recourse if the arbiter makes a completely unfair judgement (e.g. because he thinks some law should not apply, etc).
That just makes it the worst of both worlds! The whole point of arbitration is not to have a war of attrition, and to make the process efficient. Your solution doesn't take care of it. If I'm a business getting into a contract with another business, knowing that you can't outspend me in court is important, and lets both of us make a deal. If I know you still want the option to go to court, it's as if arbitration wasn't on the table.
A better system would be to change the law such that for certain, predefined offenses, you can't waive your right to go through the legal system (e.g. sexual harassment).
And of course, both parties should have say on who the arbiter is.
Finally, you are talking to someone who's had experience with arbitration. You might want to tone things down in your rhetoric if you don't have your own experience to bring to the table. Things might sound fine in theory, but can be really, really bad in practice. As an example, on How I Built This, whenever he's interviewing a founder that went to court to enforce a patent they owned, he asks if it was worth it. The answer almost always is "It was a bad idea and we shouldn't have filed a case." This is coming from those who won in court.
That's weird. Two things can be true at once: arbitrary is better than the American legal system, and the American legal system is better than what 80% of the global population live under.
It is! You explicitly have to opt in, that's why Uber needs have it in their ToS that you accept. They can't just force it on you, when you have no contractual relationship with them.
Prove it. Where are the transcripts of all arbitration proceedings so we can see that arbitration is fair?
See, that's why court proceedings are public, so that the public can verify that courts are fair. It's also why judges are appointed by democratically elected politicians. Who appointed your arbitrator?
And of course the court system is bad and unfair in a bunch of ways. But it's starting from a much better place than secret, forced arbitration.
Worth noting that this is only for the civil responsibility, that is, deciding the award of damages.
The criminal charges, if any, whether to the driver or to Uber management (possibly from the sham structuring of worker categorization and corporate structure in order to reduce tax liabilities while reducing control and thus endangering consumers) are proper in state criminal courts and can never be delegated to private courts.
In this case, that doesn't seem to be what happened? The judge ruled against them.
First to be clear, I am speaking in general terms. I know nothing about this case, I don't want to know anything about this case, but I have just scrolled through people's thoughts on arbitration here and thought I should offer a general alternative perspective. To be clear I'm not interested in blindly defending Uber either. So here goes...
Arbitration clauses will be found pretty much everywhere. They come under the auspice of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) of which the top-three ways are: mediation, arbitration and ombudsmen.
The whole point of ADR is that:
1. there are only so many courts in a given jurisdiction and there are only so many judges in any jurisdiction, and both courts and judges tend to have large backlogs.
2. added to which going to court is expensive and time consuming. And if the other side has deep pockets and you loose, you end up paying the hourly rates of very expensive lawyers in smart shoes that the opposition employed because 600+/hour/person is peanuts to them.
So that's where ADR comes in. Its more informal, its cheaper to do and the costs side if you loose are kept under control.
Because ADR is an informal environment, this can also work in your favour. The timetable and parameters are flexible and the final agreement reached can easily be better than whatever a judge might have handed down after listening to both side's lawyers bicker.
Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given some sort of ADR a go first.
Is it perfect, of course not. But neither are the courts. Your outcome in court is effectively dependent on both side's lawyers and what judge you get, so you having a better outcome in court is not necessarily guaranteed !
We all know the talking points from big corporations about why they force everyone into arbitration out of the goodness of their hearts. We don't need it regurgitated as if it's the truth.
Its not a regurgitation. Its the facts.
It applies to small businesses too.
A mom and pop shop will (or should !) also have ADR clauses in its contracts.
And the court will certainly take a very dim view if you try to sue a mom and pop shop without having tried ADR.
But Uber's terms explicitly force consumers to waive their right to go to court if they want to access Uber's service.
In most jurisdictions there are often laws related to unfair contract terms.
And even if there are no such laws, judges remain free to rule clauses and contracts void.
So you might waive that right in theory. But in practice I doubt you'll find it would hold up in court.
Arbitration is fine. There's no reason people shouldn't be allowed to freely engage the services of an arbitrator.
What people take issue with is forced arbitration. The problem isn't really about the arbitration at all, the problem is the part where you lose access to the courts. That should not be allowed.
“Nothing is stopping you” - most TOSes mandate arbitration, and unless you have something particularly egregious and a sympathetic judge the first thing on the docket is going to be a Motion to Dismiss.
And agreed. For better or worse. My minor stepdaughter was involved in a car accident. No liability was found, and the other party tried to sue her in Small Claims court which, in my state, you can’t sue a minor in (as no attorneys are permitted, so you’d have a minor representing themselves). The judge noted this, and told the other party “if you want to sue you will need to sue her parents or guardians”… and then tried to push us into binding arbitration anyway.
Which of course got my insurance company upset and involving attorneys on procedural/constitutional law, about challenging the judges authority to push us into that given there was no jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place so there was none to enforce us into arbitration (which in itself was an entirely separate farce, including where the “neutral” arbitrator berated me and said “I don’t understand why, as a person, if you know your insurance is going to be the one paying, you don’t just agree to give them all they’re asking for.”).
Video from Louis Rossmann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2B3uBQuGnU
No. Just no. We don't need monetized influencers pontificating and building fandoms on this. That is gross.
Louis founded the Consumer Rights wiki and also wrote the article that's the subject of this NH thread.
Louis Rossman does not take sponsorships, and turns off ads for his videos as much as YouTube allows. His videos are for his opinions, not making money.
Mr Rossman will literally tell you to use an ad-blocker to watch his videos and refuses to take sponsorships, actively does not want money from making YouTube videos and just wants to get the word out. I'd agree with you if it was literally any other creator.
Two things can be true at once, especially when talking about people’s behaviour. I don’t know this guy from atom, but if he’s a YouTuber then my instinct is to not trust him.
Good outcome, but forced arbitration should still be illegal.
If you have been through both processes, you would more likely say the traditional civil process should be illegal.
No, you would say it needs to be reformed and funded, we have an extremely legalistic society that allows endless delaying and does not fund its core services very well.
What's the line? If 2 brothers sign a contract, can't they decide their father will be the judge if disputes arise?
If there's a sports match, shouldn't the sports arbiter be able to decide whether some team scored a goal or not?
These are all valid civil contracts. It only affects the civil claims, never criminal, and the venue for disputing the arbitration clause (if you believe arbitration wasn't legal to begin with) are the public courts anyways, who will delegate or not to the private court.
Almost all countries recognize it and it has a quite defensible theory.
i think the keyword is "forced". there's very little now that the consumer can do because it seems everything requires arbitration now and people still have to operate in society.
I agree that word is putting some work, and calling it forced is already partisan.
To the extent that you believe it is forced, you can dispute it on a public court, and if you can prove you were forced, you wouldn't be subject to arbitration.
Arbitration in private courts only exists if both parties agree prior to agreeing to the contract to that clause.
If you believe that it's forced because you never read the Terms of Agreement, I feel that's more of a discussion of whether clickwrapped terms are valid or not, it would be a way more radical position to believe that they have absolutely no effect. And if they do have an effect, agreeing to private arbitration is no different.
It sure is contextual. And nobody would disagree with your examples. The difference here seems to be more of a power imbalance than any objection to terms. In particular, terms of service are often very dense documents. Many people are only presented these documents at the moment they sign up for a service. And people are not usually careful in these situations. I bet most of the Uber signups were outside of bars or venues where someone really needed to get home. So there’s some duress there. So it’s probably not that cut and dried. It’s more analogous to presenting a contract to harvest your wheat field the day before a big rain. If you’re the only guy with a combine for miles then that puts you in a position of relative power. And historically the US hasn’t permitted people to exploit their positions to the maximum extent, usually when it would be immoral by the standards of society. I think this exists in a gray area. It’s not that easy.
I think my gripe is less that it exists and more so that it's not a negotiated agreement. I think it should only be allowed if the contract was negotiated between two parties with full authority to offer any terms in the negotiation. If it's a standardized, take it or leave it, contract where one party has no opportunity to offer alternative terms that get proper and full consideration by the other party, it shouldn't be allowed. In most of the examples you give, they are contracts that have been clearly negotiated between parties, not click-wrapped take it or leave it, my way or the highway, terms.
The line that minimum should be against using this as a tool against consumers. To the extent it should exist at all, which is arguable, it must be between parties that are either equal in standing or have genuine commercial disputes between duly organized business entities.
I think such terms should require signatures and initials. Holding people to terms they are unaware of is not fair.
Arbitration isn't the issue. The issue is when one of the parties has vastly more legal resources than the other, and gets to pick the arbiter.
Arbitration is fine for two equal parties when a third party neutral arbiter is chosen. I've been through that kind of arbitration and it was great.
But when the huge company gets to pick the arbiter (or even just threaten the arbiter with taking away all their other cases), that is when you have problems.
Secret justice is not justice.
So should guilty pleas, nondisclosure agreements, and trials where juries can't decide on degree rather than prosecutors.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49761654
All these companies are universally sleazy and refuse to take responsibility, no matter what. It's pretty much par for the course: deny you are responsible, try to control the court case in such a way that you inflict even more suffering on the victims and their families and ultimately, even if you're found to be in the wrong do everything to stall payment until each and every legal avenue to do so is exhausted.
The dream of every major tech company, making ridiculous profits while taking zero legal responsibility for what you create...
The bad guy here is the driver. Could Uber have done more? That's what the arbitrators concluded.
But the reality is that this is a victory for the driverless cars (Waymo, Tesla, etc.). If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.
Do you expect that Waymo will not take responsibility for the driverless car?
There was no world in which driverless cars weren't the eventual outcome anyway.
And, it's not exactly taking responsibility for the driver. It's taking responsibility for the safety of the passenger using their service. This is a different thing. Driverless cars still can't allow their passengers to get injured and killed which is going to present a lot of technical and social challenges for these companies.
They all thought that playing a word game would get them out of the difficult problems all transportation companies have to solve and be liable for.
There's this prevailing narrative that someday self-driving cars will eliminate all human-controlled driving and that these types of stories are like milestones in the path to that future utopia.
But I don't think that's the case anymore than the narrative that LLMs will eventually displace all software engineers.
The invention of the automobile didn't eliminate all horses, but it certainly replaced the vast majority of horses.
In 7 years we've gone from GPT-2 to Fable and Astra. There seems to be no sign of slowdown, except from the top AI labs who want to slow down out of caution. It would be incredibly surprising to me if in another 7 years, my software engineering skills were still useful. AI capabilities will get to the point where even the best human is adding noise to the system, similar to today's chess engines and calculators.
Self-driving cars will take longer to roll out because they require new hardware and changes to laws, but I don't see how a career such as "truck driver" or "cab driver" exists in 20 years. At most it would be for a few niche uses and tourism novelty (similar to steam locomotives or horse-drawn buggies).
I mostly agree. However, I do actually think that many of the skills you use as a software engineer will still be useful in 7 years. It's just that, as you suggest, no one will let us near any actual code.
This profession has always required reskilling/ changing based on new technologies. How many people are still meaningfully employed as pascal programmers?
Self-driving cars and trucks will eliminate human-controlled driving in the same way that engines (ICE, electric, steam, whatever) have eliminated human and animal powered transportation.
Yes, there are a few people around who ride horses, have an ox-cart or pedal their own bikes, but in a commercial sense, those are rounding errors.
Compilers have already replaced software engineers producing native code by hand. (Apart from a handful of exceptions.) LLMs will and do have a similar impact one level higher.
I'm really, really happy when I see my less technical friends suddenly vibe-code things they have dreamed up!
And when will the self driving car be able to orthogonal park a trailer by backing down and alley?
I don't know what that means. But presumably you are talking about some difficult technical feat that one can perform with a vehicle?
I'm fairly sure, if it's something mechanical and a human can do it, the computers won't be far behind. But even if not, we can redesign the vehicles to make it easier for a computer, eg we can make all axes or even all wheels independently steerable and control their velocity individually. A human would be overwhelmed with that, they can barely keep hold of a steering wheel, but a computer wouldn't mind too much.
No. The easiest thing to do would be arbitrate against uber. Deploying a fleet of self driving cars would be much, much more complicated.
To use the force of law and government to force them to take responsibility.
Every other answer is bullshit.
This sounds about right. When Uber's driverless car killed someone they got off pretty easy:
*"In March 2019, Arizona prosecutors ruled that Uber was not criminally responsible for the crash. The back-up driver of the vehicle was charged with negligent homicide, pled guilty to endangerment, and was sentenced to three years' probation." [0]
0:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
We can agree that the driver made bad choices but I feel like you are skimming over the 2 women's responsibility in this situation. Intoxicated to the point of vomiting, arguing over the cleaning fee, and wandering away from the car while parked, yes illegally, on the freeway.
Not sure what your experiences have been with drunk people but I can tell you that dealing with 1 drunk person can be hard to control, let alone 2.
I'd be interested to hear where other people draw the line on the driver's culpability. If he left them at a gas station and one of them was still hit and killed by a car would he still be at fault? In my mind Uber/Lyft provide transportation, they aren't babysitters, there has to be a limit to their responsibility. Perhaps the driver was more at fault here but this outcome (how the driver reacted) is not in the slightest bit surprising to me given everything I know about Uber and how it treats drivers and passengers.
Uber is bad too for not training drivers to not do something like this.
You all realize that when AI takes everyone's jobs the only way people will survive is by pledging allegiance to AI companies so they feed and house them right? Its not going to lead to some utopia where people are free to paint and write novels all day. People will basically become slaves to these companies.
I would think twice about pushing for driverless cars and replacing people with agentic workflows.
Isn't their entire business model build around bypassing the regulations build around the taxi industry? Things like training for new drivers and I think they even refused to do mandatory background checks early on.
When their driverless car ran over a cyclist they pretended it was too dark to see anything, using a video from a cheap camera as "evidence".
So Uber took this into forced arbitration to avoid the courts and then the arbitration blew up in their face. Sorry, but there’s some strong schadenfreude there.
Arbitration has no particular basis in law so much as agreeing that a third party reaches some conclusion to resolve a civil dispute, though the law may be used to justify the conclusion, the conclusion is binding regardless, so as to make it so there's no appeals, etc., right? So by participating in the arbitration it means there's only the conclusion and no basis to object or appeal, right?
Federal law [1] and at least one state [2] provide routes for appeal to real courts.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/9/16
[2] https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=7.06.050
Another frustrating aspect of forced arbitration is Uber can now avoid ever using that arbitrator ever again.
People do that with judges too. It’s why all mp3 sharing lawsuits were in the same district of Texas.
At no point in time has anyone ever suspected that companies requiring arbitration was in the best interests of the consumer. This is very plainly an attempt to avoid responsibility and consequences. It's a margin-improving policy. The safety of its customers are merely a number on a spreadsheet.
Imagine how this could've gone if Uber had used its tracking and vast knowledge of roadways to know to follow up with riders on a cancelled ride on the highway or even deny drivers the right to cancel the trip on the highway because that is unsafe. Could've prevented all this, have they learned from this case to prevent future incidents?
If the driver wants you out, being unable to cancel the trip won't stop them throwing you out.
So wait. There’s a literal DEATH involved here and it still went to arbitration?!
This is what happens when every single company we have an app for forces us to re-agree to new TOC (most this year, but last year too).
Go check your e-mail - look at all the TOC agreements you had to make recently. How many added a new (or amended an existing) arbitration clause?
Too many. And consumers are stuck either agreeing blindly/under duress, or uninstalling the app? These are apps we use and rely on, and don't have enough competition to refuse.
Lyft and Uber. Name one other competitor in the app space. Without googling it
Rant over (it wasn't even a rant at the beginning but couldn't help myself)