I hope this title can be clarified, but that although a transaction is indeed not required, an intention to enter into a transaction seems to be required.
> Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Liu emphasized that “a person suffers discrimination under the Act when the person presents himself or herself to a business with an intent to use its services but encounters an exclusionary policy or practice that prevents him or her from using those services,” […]
An intention to enter into an online transaction for the point of a business agreement is any attempt to create any online account. This is particularly true for social media where the user is the product and their data is a revenue generating business commodity immediately available regardless of whether that user ever returns to the site.
This legal decision is a very good thing. The terms of service clauses only exist to limit the rights of the user for the sake of lowering litigation risks against the site in question. These agreements need to be destroyed. If any site wishes to limit user rights or limit risks of litigation they should directly alter their products to apply such limits directly.
So long as online business makes a good faith effort to limit functional access to their products/services that would otherwise violate the agreeable terms they are already legally covered from litigation risks without need for a terms of service agreement, such as anti-hacking laws. The point of these agreements is to allow such websites necessary protection from litigation intentionally withholding any equivalent functional limitations upon their users. The reason for that is they want user contributions with the fewest barriers upon those users and the maximal harvesting of the resulting user engagement.
> And merely awareness is not enough.
How do you legally prove intention? The practical distinction that applied to this particular legal case is that the plaintiff merely read the site's terms of service agreement insinuating that had they not been serious about opening an account they would not have taken such an effort. They did not take any further action to engage that business, however, such as ever navigating to the site's account creation page.
I hope this is a step towards voiding terms of services protections from online businesses.
I don't view any of this as having to do with business risk, as the article dealt primarily with who had standing to sue, not about the actual practices/policies of Square.
However, as a matter of Bankruptcy law, purchases made with a credit card with no intent to pay back are not dischargeable by bankruptcy courts. Sometimes any purchases made just prior to bankruptcy, and especially any abnormally large purchases are not considered dischargeable, and in some cases are presumptive fraud. I think this is where the prohibition against credit card use for bankruptcy lawyers comes from. [0]
In this case, the business with the risk is the bank lending the money through the credit card. And credit card purchases made just before declaring bankruptcy are highly scrutinized as potential fraud. Paying the lawyer with additional debt you're attempting to get discharged would seem to fall under that category. As a result, in practice, you won't find bankruptcy lawyers accepting CC payments from their clients. If they accept CC payments, it must be from someone other than the client. (family, friend, etc.)
Given this, there is no reason to price the risk (a customer paying their lawyer with debt that will be discharged) into their pricing: it is already prohibited by statute.
> Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Liu emphasized that “a person suffers discrimination under the Act when the person presents himself or herself to a business with an intent to use its services but encounters an exclusionary policy or practice that prevents him or her from using those services,” […]
And merely awareness is not enough.