Re: Long-term viability: telephone numbers as aliases

["Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <dee@cybercash.com>]

Phone numbers are not stable.  The UK and France both recently did major
surgery on their numbering systems due to running out of numbers.  There is
no particular reason to believe that country codes will all be stable, what
with countries splitting at their current rate.  It wasn't that long ago that
the eastern Masschusetts 617 area code where I live was split into 617 and
508 and now they are talking of possibly splitting each of those. And dumping
a huge number of entries into one zone, like the .num proposal suggests,
isn't really practical.  Sure the technology can keep being stretched but if
you had a zone will billions of entries, with possibly one in a thousand
being updated daily and frequent huge batches (like tens of millions when a
country changes and just millions when an area or city code renumbers) being
changed when wholesale numbering udpates occur...  It's just a bit hard to
imagine it really working, especially given the update authentication
problems, etc.  (.com is tiny in comparison and I don't think this argument
substantially effects the viability of having shared iTLD zones as small as
.com is now or only say ten times bigger)

On the other hand, as pointed out in another message, the .tpc.int domain
could be practially used.  There is no reason that
mail@7.7.8.4.7.8.2.8.0.5.1.tpc.int shouldn't get mail to all four people who
reside where that number rings by going to some host, probably at
7.8.2.8.0.5.1.tpc.int which maps to a physical telephone office nearby, that
forwards it to the four email addresses for these four people. (notice that
already its more complex than your message indicates).  Any maybe mail to an
automobile cell phone installed in a car should go to all the people who
usually drive it....  In fact, the only phone number I can think of that
really maps just to me is my beeper number and I think that, world wide, 
not everyone has a beeper...

Almost the *entire* reason for the creation of DNS who to provide
*distributed* update and control, replacing the centralized hosts file. 
Creating a multi-billion entry zone doesn't sound like that.  Consider how
long it would take to zone transfer.  Much worse: consider how long it would
take to sign under DNS security.  But better use of .tpc.int, which could be
delegated to maintainers corresponding to country codes and subdelegated
further, seems quite practical. 

What would you do if someone registered their email address under your phone
number?  Seems like you need to be authenticated by your telephone company. 
Why not just have that company maintain some number of local zones that cut
on digit boundaries?  (Where there is some shared number space, like
1800/1888, whatever entity manages the sharing can do this.)

Donald

On Thu, 21 Nov 1996, Lloyd S. Etheredge wrote: 

> Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 01:55:23 -0500
> From: Lloyd S. Etheredge <letedge@postoffice.worldnet.att.net>
> To: iahc-discuss@iahc.org
> Cc: letedge@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu
> Subject: Long-term viability: telephone numbers as aliases
> 
> Current naming conventions probably cannot be sustained if exponential
> growth continues. Especially if people want near-reasonable acronyms in
> their native language.

Not clear to me, with better use of country code TLDs, a few more iTLDs, 
and better use of deeper domain names.

> Most individuals/organizations already have unique identifiers
> (telephone numbers). Why not make life simple and permit these to be
> used to designate Email addresses or Web sites? If you dial directly
> over the telephone, it's a standard telephone call. If you input the
> number as an address on the Web, the connection is to whatever location
> the individual/ organization has established as the default.
> 
> I'd hate to lose the charm of reasonable or near-reasonable acronyms,
> especially if the organization is widely known by its initials (AAAS;
> EPA; UNESCO). This would be a completely reasonable category to continue
> and - like designer license plates - it would be completely reasonable
> to charge an annual fee. But we don't try to base the assignment of home
> and corporate telephone numbers - or the future of the world's telephone
> system - on this type of awkwardly-constrained method. 

I think that's a historic artifact.  Mechanical relay telephone systems were
pretty dependent on simple dial pulses.  In fact, earlier manual systems
worked by your asking a human being to connect you to some person/location by
name.  It's not at all clear to me that future phone systems won't be based
on voice recognition with numeric dialing as just a back up (sort of like IP
addresses :-) ). 

>      I hope we can get a simple, user-friendly, system. Existing
> telephone numbers aren't an exciting innovation, but I think they're a
> good answer (& they are an accepted international addressing standard).
> And, in the long-term, I think we all will come to appreciate the
> savings in time and record-keeping.
> 
>      Best wishes for your work,
> 
>      Lloyd Etheredge
> _______
> Lloyd Etheredge, Director
> International Scientific Networks Project
> Policy Science Center - 314 Yale Law Bldg.
> letedge@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu (Internet)

Donald
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