Every Website Should Have a Founding Document

Nobody has ever read a Terms of Service. This is not a controversial claim. It is closer to a law of physics.

And yet websites keep writing them: forty pages of arbitration clauses that every single user scrolls past in under a second, clicking "I Agree" with the calm indifference of someone signing for a package.

Here is a better idea. A preamble.

Short. Declarative. Slightly grand. Something like: *We the users, in order to form a more perfect website, establish justice for the back button, ensure domestic tranquility in the comment section, and promise not to sell your email to a mattress company.*

You would read that. You might even remember it. And critically, you would notice immediately if the site stopped living up to it — which is a thing that has never once happened with a Terms of Service, because nobody knows what is in them, including, in most cases, the company.

The legal department will say this is not enforceable. The legal department is correct. That is rather the point. The documents we actually keep are the ones we agree with, not the ones we agreed to.