--On Thursday, December 30, 2021 10:50 +0100 Vittorio Bertola <vittorio.bertola=40open-xchange.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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, and the > languages that are likely to work when communicating). > > 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. I would only observe the similarities between the hierarchy implied by telephone numbers (especially before number portability in many countries, which has improved them as identifiers and created other problem), and the X.500 identifier and certificate plan. I think the bottom line is that one either hands these problems over to governments and their designees (another hierarchy but potentially a rather flat one) or treats them as private (whether intended to e for-profit or not) activities/enterprises. Either lends itself to abuse. Perhaps one of the better ways to evaluate any such system is to consider how it could be abused or attacked and then pick the sort of actual or potential abuses one prefers. john
