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Internet addresses, phone numbers could soon be interchangeable: consultant: 'It's the blob that ate Chicago'
The Ottawa Citizen
Wed 05 May 2004
Page: D2
Section: Business
Byline: Peter Wilson
Source: The Vancouver Sun
VANCOUVER - Within two to three years, your
Internet address could become your phone number.
At the same time, your phone number could be your Internet
address.
The system, called ENUM, is designed to converge the telephone
numbering system with Internet domain names.
For example, you could dial 1-613-555-1234 and send the person
who owns the Internet domain anybody.ca an e-mail to her Blackberry.
Type anybody.ca into your laptop and you could connect with that
person's phone at her lakeside cabin. Or her cellular phone on the
road.
"It's the blob that ate Chicago," Ottawa tech consultant Timothy
Denton said. "The domain name system is going to blob over and take
over the phone addressing system."
Mr. Denton -- a board member of the Canadian Internet
Registration Authority (CIRA), which
was meeting in Vancouver yesterday -- was quick, however, to point
out that ENUM is not the precursor to a massive digital invasion of
privacy, or some kind of spammer's heaven.
"For ENUM to be accepted as a computer product, people have to
feel they're in control of how they're reached," Mr. Denton said.
"That's vital. So if you have an ENUM-enabled telephone number,
you can say I can be reached by e-mail in these circumstances, or,
under other conditions, by voice-mail, or cellular."
In mid-February, the administration of U.S. President George W.
Bush put its support behind ENUM. Canada has taken no official
stand.
"What ENUM does is take the whole addressing system that used to
be in the phone system and swaps it over and puts it in the
Internet's domain name system," Mr. Denton said.
This, he said, will also make voice-over-Internet protocol
services work more smoothly.
It will also increase the speed at which number portability --
the ability to carry the same phone number with you wherever you go
-- is adopted.
"Once you've gone over to a domain-name system for your
numbering, you're no longer stuck with being tied to an area code or
a number -- 604 (Vancouver's area code) will gradually lose its
geographical relationship to Vancouver."
As well, phone numbers might be handed out, as domain names are
on the Internet, by dozens of different companies, including
telephone companies.
Meanwhile, the English-heavy, Eurocentric address structure of
the Internet is about to undergo radical change. Paul Twomey, chief
executive of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers,
said Chinese, Korean and Japanese are being introduced into the
domain naming system previously dominated by anglicized Web
addresses.
With tricky linguistic problems worked out, Chinese, Korean and
Japanese domain names are increasingly coming into use.
These languages and character sets could soon be followed by
Arabic and Cyrillic, said Mr. Twomey.
Even so, the top-level domains -- such as .com, edu, .biz, gov,
and even .jp for japan, .cn for China and .kr for South Korea --
will remain in place internationally. But that, too, could change
eventually, he said.
The challenge, he said, has been to get agreement by the domain
name registries in China, Taiwan, Korean and Japan as to which
characters designate what.
There is, however, another problem raised by all of this, he
said, that of the possibility of the Internet splitting into tiny,
individual fiefdoms based on language or geography.
Edition: Final
Story Type: Business
Length: 541 words