Establishing a single document, known as a “terms of service” for the entire United States to access the internet and anything on it would be an awful idea. The idea of replacing all the thousands of complicated terms of services for various internet services that Americans use sounds like a simple solution, in reality it could be easily abused and would end up causing more trouble than it saved.
Right now if an American wants to use iTunes, for example, they must agree to the software’s terms of service written by Apple, which says that they won’t do anything illegal with the software, can’t hold Apple liable for any damages, etc. If an American wants to use Excel, they must agree to that software’s terms of service written by Microsoft, etc. Virtually every piece of software available for download requires an agreement to a terms of service written by the company that developed the application, to keep them out of any liability.
The problem with a universal, overarching US Terms of Service is that not everyone on the internet uses every piece of software, yet everyone who wanted to use the internet would have to agree to a terms of service that included clauses and agreements from thousands of companies that they’d never have time to read. This boxes people into unnecessary constraints that they would not ordinarily have to abide by.
Secondly, the US Terms of Service would be far too long for anyone to actually read. Not that any individual piece of software’s Terms of Service are brief at all... But a single documents to permit people to use anything on the internet would probably be thousands of pages and several terabytes in size.
Thirdly, the only way to create a single document for every American to use the internet’s software is to have every software maker in the country submit their own Terms to combine into a single document. The only problem with this is moderation. Who has the duty of reading all these documents and proofreading to make sure nothing goes wrong? With all these thousands and thousands of pages of documents, it would theoretically be extremely easy for a company on the list to throw in a clause that could be used to take advantage of any user of their software. It would be even more difficult to find these strange clauses in a universal Terms of Service than it already is in a single Terms of Service document for a single piece of software.
Finally, a single US Terms of Service would likely be nearly impossible to create and include every software maker, due to conflicts between involved companies. There are companies that have parts of their own software’s terms of service dedicated to the use of other pieces of software. Such cross-company clauses wouldn’t work out when these companies all have to submit their Terms of Service into a single document. Companies in legal disputes, or companies that already don’t get along well would likely have a problem collaborating on a legal document.
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