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Dragging Telephone Numbers Into the Internet Age
azoblue writes with this teaser from Ars Technica, presenting a tempting suggestion for online consolidation: "E-mail, IM, Facebook, phones—what if all of these ways to reach you over a network could be condensed into a single, unique number? The ENUM proposal aims to do just that, by giving everyone a single phone number that maps to all of their identifiers. Here's how it works, and why it isn't already widely used."
Jenny, I got your number
I'm gonna make you mine
Jenny, I got your number
86.75.30.9
John
Great, then spammers only need one number to send you all sorts of spam in all kinds of different ways. And even better, they can try random numbers!
All I can think of is SPAM. I understand the idea and sometimes I think it'd be a great tool (especially if you move ISP's etc, everything would move with you kind of like redirecting your real mail when you move house but with less hassle) but I consider my privacy (what little we have left in this world) way more important than having a single identifier.
Why would I want a "number" for that? That's why DNS was invented, so we could move forward from using numbers to identify things and use proper identifiers instead. This is a step backwards in many ways.
Why would you want to keep the telephone number?
The telephone number is a good example of a situation where the technical factor prevailed over the human factor. Numbers are abstract and difficult to remember for most people. And since its invention we have needed to use lists to associate these numbers to things we actually can remember, such as names.
I think it will go completely the other way, and that in 50 years people will never have heard of phone numbers. The identifier will be the email address, and if I want to call someone I select that address and press "call", and a VOIP connection will be made. If I want to IM or mail, I press other buttons.
The email address is easy to remember, it has build-in identification of the purpose you want to use it for (private, business, ...), can already be used for several types of communication (mail, jabber) and is completely transparent to location
I didn't RTFA, but it's not a new idea, and both you and the submitter seem to be missing the point. You can store arbitrary contact addresses in NAPTR records in DNS, so you can store email, SIP, POTS addresses, or anything else that can be represented by a URI. The other part of this is allowing reverse mappings, from telephone numbers to something less archaic.
Telephone numbers, like IP addresses, are globally unique network endpoint identifiers. They are assigned by the UN (specifically the ITU-T, which assigns prefixes to countries) and allow you to call any telephone from any other telephone in the world. The problem comes when you have an endpoint that is really a SIP account, for example. Currently, that mapping has to be done in quite a static way.
The idea of the proposal is that the e164.arpa. domain will be reserved for resolving telephone numbers to domains, just as in-addr.arpa is used for resolving IP addresses to names. This doesn't need to be government run, but it does need to be authoritative. That means that e164.arpa will be controlled by the ITU, 1.e164.arpa will be controlled by the USA, 4.4.e164.arpa by the UK and so on. You will then get a subdomain of this. Telephone companies that have large assignments of phone numbers get large ones, individuals may get a single 15-digit number. This can then map to any other resource.
It's not intended as a long-term solution. Eventually, the POTS network is going away (large chunks of it are IP internally already) and you will just use DNS to map directly to SIP, but while interoperability with the POTS network is desirable - say, for the next couple of decades - this lets people with POTS phones initiate calls to SIP phones without having to define a specific bridge or static routing. You'll dial a number on your phone, your telco will look up the SIP address and then route the call there via their bridge.
I currently have a phone number connected to a SIP address, but it only works from POTS lines because my SIP provider operates a SIP to POTS bridge. With this proposal, anyone can operate one trivially. You will just need to get an e164 number assigned to you and configure the DNS entries to point to your Asterisk (or whatever) server.
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A single number to identify people would be just as powerful as a SSN or driver's license number. It would make fraud so much easier. Eventually people would compile databases tying these IDs to SSNs and would distribute those online. Then we would start seeing advisories to keep your single contact number a secret!
On the positive side, perhaps this would help to convince financial institutions that simply knowing someone's SSN and mother's maiden name doesn't prove anything about identity.