And yet you can literally pick up a [product engineered to a phone company’s specifications], dial some numbers [assigned by a phone company] and reach everyone else who [also agreed to the phone company’s TOS] [as long as you and them have paid a large monthly fee].

This isn’t freedom. Companies still decide how you can use their services.

If only they were required to use caller ID to reliably tell us who is calling...

I've been waiting for that to happen on cell and landline numbers. Authentication for the party calling. At this point, there's no other option than legislation. Just mandate how common voice services like landline and cellular operate their business.

It needs to happen otherwise the only solution is to give them up and only do our own outbound calling, never to actually receive any calls at all.

Other options like blocking all calls from non-contacts is risky because a call from a delivery driver or babysitter in an emergency will be missed. It's about the only option though for enduser today.

Oh it’s even worse than that. I have a land line that I use exclusively for when I’m forced to give a phone number (and also for faxing doctors and lawyers which is apparently still a thing). Many internet forms reject it because it can’t accept text messages. Yeah, that’s the fucking point. I don’t want text messages from your shitty service. It’s still a legitimate phone number you can call. Don’t ask for a phone number if you won’t actually accept a valid phone number! FFS!

As long as people keep paying the phone bills, this doesn't strike me as something that is destroying the business of phone companies.

That’s a very first world observation, and even there, this would be quite shaky if actual numbers were known.

Also, I didn’t say or intend to mean that these companies made excluding people a goal. Their decisions, on the contrary, have resulted in that.

I've literally never heard of this. So much of my day-to-day work and personal communication would pretty much never happen if I had to ask for permission every time before I called someone. Is it a millennial thing?

Phones (telephones, that is) and phone numbers are exactly for spontaneous voice communication. If someone doesn't want to be called out of the blue, they can choose to not give their number out to people. Or for texting say, hey, here's my number but I'm so busy that texting is usually better for me. And with today's smartphones that tell you who is calling (or at least, whether or not it's someone you know), it's _way_ easier to decide whether or not to answer a call than it was two or three decades ago where the phone just rang and that was all you got.

Of course you are. I'm speaking from an American perspective, but this is the very foundation of liberty.

> The network does not provide the required environment to make this possible. Why? It's not the hardware.

I do not own the network that my phone operates on, and the people that do have decided to control what they allow on it. I can start my own network and attempt to compete.

Nah, it really doesn't when compared to something like getting banned from facebook.

I make way more video calls with people than I make phone calls. And probably around 50% of my communication is done over FB message.

It would be way less of a problem to get banned from making phone calls for me and for many other people.

There is a reason that most companies make it hard to talk to a human before you've already exhausted all other support channels.

Make something like that a right and people will use it. Maybe 99% of the time you won't need a human for a particular service in a month, but there will be users who are on the phone every day, maybe multiple times per day.

And your monthly fee would need to exist to pay for the users who abuse the right.

Do you have all your coworkers' personal phone numbers?

Possibly, although... you're paying for your phone service. You're not paying for parler, facebook, twitter, etc.

I'm curious what you mean by that. By "needy" do you mean the people answering the phones, or the people calling?

Are you paying for it?

I can be reached by telephone. What I don't have is a unique telephone number. This works perfectly fine for actual voice communication. If you think I can simply afford an extra monthly expense, you're wrong.

> You are like 0.0000001% of the market.

Made up statistics reveal your presuppositions.

There are a lot of people that don't have a unique phone number. It's a minority position, but that's kind of my point: chat services do not inherently depend on traditional phone numbers, and requiring one is going to exclude more people than you probably realize.

Someone is creating a phone book as a service to companies.

Elsewhere, these companies are publishing their phone numbers to get more customers.

Then the phone book creators demand license fees anywhere these phone numbers appear in lists.

It's very dubious "database rights" come into play at all.

I certainly don't care if foreign call centers can't call me from domestic numbers. If they want to call me and try to sell me some scam, they can use a number that's local to them.

I built my company from nothing - and still clean the toilet as part of the team.

I however don't give out my cell phone number as 99% of the time the resulting conversation would not be the best use of my time.

I personally, absolutely do not think of it that way. Whenever I get called by a call center, I always immediately say "not interested" and drop the call. It's rude, but I think these companies are not entitled to my time.

Because of that I think the problem is already there. This is certainly another step in the wrong direction, but thousands of workers in thousands of callcenters are basically already a human botnet.