Hi -
On 2021-12-30 1:50 AM, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
Il 30/12/2021 03:29 Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ha
scritto:
If we were to redo telephone numbers, we would not do exchanges or
area codes. They are no longer necessary and to the extent they still
have meaning, it is privacy violating meaning.
There would be reasons to keep country codes, though. Both
organizational (they naturally federate the namespace and define
jurisdictional spaces) and functional (at least you know the part of the
world where the person is from,
Not really, depending on what you mean by "from," and whether you
expect the numbers to be stable over a person's lifetime.
For example, here in San Jose, California, approximately 38% of
the population is foreign-born.
and the languages that are likely to
work when communicating).
Hardly. There's good reason signs on buses here in San Jose are in
Vietnamese and Spanish as well as English, while in other cities other
languages will be used, e.g. in Minneapolis one might see English,
Spanish, Somali, and Hmong.
If one really cares about getting the right language(s), then
BCP 47 is a good start.
For the same reasons, some big / federal / multinational countries might
want to keep area codes as well. Indeed, even in a mid-sized monolingual
country like Italy it is very useful to know at a glance whether a fixed
number is from Sicily or from Venice. You could make this optional and
subject to user consent, but in many cases it would make sense to get a
geolocated number.
Again, if these numbers are stable, they really won't tell where the
user is. For example, here in San Jose, California, approximately 38%
of the population is foreign-born. Even within the country, does it
help for me to be attributed a location roughly three thousand
kilometers from where I have lived for decades?
Overloading an identifier with mutable attributes (languages understood,
nationality, location, legal jurisdiction) seems fundamentally
unworkable to me.
Randy
