The Case of the Missing White Pages
There’s no white pages for cellphone numbers, and it doesn’t seem likely that there’ll be one soon. A few years ago, the cellphone industry’s main trade group hired a company to assemble such a directory, but the effort collapsed after some carriers lobbied against it and surveys showed a majority of customers didn’t want it. Subsequent efforts have fared little better: Earlier this year, a company called Intelius shuttered an online directory of 90 million mobile numbers amid anger from cellphone users and threats from Verizon. (Intelius — not Intellius, as I had it earlier — still offers a reverse-lookup service, for a fee.)
In backpedaling, Intelius said that “it’s clear the market is still not ready.” But it may never be.
The principal reason there’s no cellphone directory is simple: We don’t want one.
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Why not? Because in a number of important ways, the cellphone is more of a break with traditional telephone service than it is an evolution of it. And those differences will only become more apparent in the coming years.
Source: Wall Street Journal