I grew up in Norway, and now live in the UK, and one of the big shocks to the system on moving to the UK was that in Norway even most employment contracts - contracts which has a very substantial impact on peoples lives -, are often a page or less. Exceptions are very senior staff and sometimes multinationals who don't know better (half the time most of their extra verbiage is null and void due to legal restrictions in employment law). The most complex Norwegian employment contract I had was a couple of pages, mostly just spelling out terms which were covered by the law anyway.
The reason is simple: There are presumed legal defaults for almost everything, such as duration of notice periods (typically 3 months) and other terms, and except for clauses that have little impact on the employee the defaults are good enough that few companies want to go above and beyond, and trying to deviate the other way (offer less than the default; such as e.g. a 1 month notice period) is often difficult, sometimes impossible, and almost always requires consideration that makes it unattractive (before I moved from Norway I'd never once had an employment contract where someone tried to pay me less than 3 months notice, but I had one where they wanted to retain the right to pay me in lieu of notice)
The irony is that while Norway is often seen as complicated for businesses, in this respect things are easy unless you try to make it hard on yourself: You can draft a valid employment contract yourself in less than a page. A well regulated environment can reduce a lot of friction even if the regulated terms are not exactly how you'd like them to be.
But for employment the importance is at least significant enough that you can expect people to read the contract even if it's longer.
For things like subscriptions etc. there's even less reason there can't be reasonable defaults and why you can't make it hard or unattractive to deviate from those defaults, such as by requiring the contract to offer concessions in return.
I grew up in Norway, and now live in the UK, and one of the big shocks to the system on moving to the UK was that in Norway even most employment contracts - contracts which has a very substantial impact on peoples lives -, are often a page or less. Exceptions are very senior staff and sometimes multinationals who don't know better (half the time most of their extra verbiage is null and void due to legal restrictions in employment law). The most complex Norwegian employment contract I had was a couple of pages, mostly just spelling out terms which were covered by the law anyway.
The reason is simple: There are presumed legal defaults for almost everything, such as duration of notice periods (typically 3 months) and other terms, and except for clauses that have little impact on the employee the defaults are good enough that few companies want to go above and beyond, and trying to deviate the other way (offer less than the default; such as e.g. a 1 month notice period) is often difficult, sometimes impossible, and almost always requires consideration that makes it unattractive (before I moved from Norway I'd never once had an employment contract where someone tried to pay me less than 3 months notice, but I had one where they wanted to retain the right to pay me in lieu of notice)
The irony is that while Norway is often seen as complicated for businesses, in this respect things are easy unless you try to make it hard on yourself: You can draft a valid employment contract yourself in less than a page. A well regulated environment can reduce a lot of friction even if the regulated terms are not exactly how you'd like them to be.
But for employment the importance is at least significant enough that you can expect people to read the contract even if it's longer.
For things like subscriptions etc. there's even less reason there can't be reasonable defaults and why you can't make it hard or unattractive to deviate from those defaults, such as by requiring the contract to offer concessions in return.