Do you listen to vinyl records? I have a large collection of vinyl, but it has been years since I last owned a turntable. Do you still carry cash? I cannot tell you the exact date that I stopped bothering to put notes in my wallet but I can confirm that the small pile of change on my dresser table does nothing but gather dust. Do you still have a landline at home? It is well over a decade since I stopped paying for that needless expense. Are you still answering your telephone when you receive a call from an unrecognized number? By now, you have the gist of my argument. Telcos, other businesses and governments remain wedded to the idea of telephone numbers that can be used by anybody to contact anybody else at any time. The mobile revolution seemed to guarantee the dominance of phone numbers as an addressing system because it changed the paradigm from one number per household to one number per person. But if you ever use Teams or WhatsApp or Slack — and most of you use internet-based apps like these every day — then you are already familiar with a different paradigm for how to instigate a conversation with somebody who is not in your presence. Ordinary people do not feel obliged to play vinyl records or carry cash just to sustain the businesses that manufacture turntables or ATMs. They will not feel obliged to answer calls to their phone number if the inconvenience created by unwanted calls outweighs the benefits of continuing to do so.

I routinely mock professional associations that get their news about the comms industry from the same news outlets as the general public. What kind of insider knows no more about their industry than some random individual who also reads the BBC News website? A glut of mainstream news articles claim that the problem of voice phishing has grown worse in recent months. That means the problem has actually grown worse in recent years. Journalists only write articles when they think there will be a worthwhile audience for them. Criminals do not just sit around doing nothing, then suddenly all begin committing the same crimes. They try things. They learn from experience. Some criminals teach other criminals. When a crime is lucrative and goes unpunished then they tend to do a lot more of that crime. Criminals will have invested in, developed and ramped up scam enterprises over the course of several years before the consequences will grab the attention of the mainstream press. If industry insiders only respond to mainstream news then it reveals their incompetence at detecting and responding to trends on a timely basis. Or to put it another way, if you need to read the newspaper to discover sales of your product have plummeted or that your business is insolvent then you have no concept of how to adapt a corporate strategy on a timely basis. The same timelines apply to strategies for crime prevention. People who are content to play ‘whac a mole’ are perennial losers because they confuse reacting to crime with having a strategy to reduce crime.

The communications industry is caught between two stools right now. Some people continue to bet on telephone numbers as a universal addressing system. They will have a lot of support from governments and businesses that like the idea of each person having a number that both identifies an individual uniquely and which also can be used to contact that individual, even if you know nothing else about the individual. It is in their interest to have such a system. The question is whether having phone numbers will continue to be in the best interest of the individuals on the receiving end of government and business. Or to be precise, the question is whether the majority of the public will start to treat communications sent to phone numbers like communications posted to mailboxes. A modern mailbox is a place to temporarily park junk before most or all of it is destroyed. When was the last time you received a letter from a friend or relative? The role of the mailbox has changed, and so has our perception of it. Some are working on more secure ways to associate an address with the user of a phone. The work is important but inevitably impeded by network effects. Addressing systems work well if everybody uses them, and the same is true of identification systems. Modern communications needs addressing and identification to converge, but it is a lot easier to see the need than to reach a consensus on how that need will be satisfied in practice.