Consumer Protection Is Built Around Unequal Power
The Rules We Rely On Before We Even Notice Them Most people do not wake up thinking about consumer protection. They think about paying the electric bill, replacing a phone charger, signing up for a streaming service, or figuring out which of the common budget categories is quietly eating more of their paycheck than expected. Consumer law usually stays invisible until something goes wrong. That invisibility is part of what makes it easy to underestimate. We tend to imagine consumer protection as a set of after the fact remedies, like filing a complaint after a scam or getting a refund after a defective purchase. But that is only part of the story. The deeper purpose of consumer protection is not simply to clean up messes. It is to shape the marketplace around a basic truth: ordinary people and large businesses do not meet each other as equals. A company can hire chemists, engineers, marketers, and lawyers. It can test price points, rewrite contracts, study user behavior, an...