Listing again

FEW things cause more trouble in the online world than lists. The body overseeing the Internet's domain-name system, ICANN, keeps making unfortunate headlines; recently, one of the group's own board members sued it to open its books. Now another electronic directory has become a bone of contention: ENUM, a way of turning telephone numbers into Internet addresses by converting the numbers into domain names ending in .arpa.

This convergence, everybody agrees, is a good idea. It would give a boost to Internet telephony and foster interesting new services. Instead of listing everything from mobile-phone numbers to instant-messaging addresses on business cards, people could hand out a single telephone number. An ENUM service would then make sure that calls were routed to their telephone and e-mails to their inbox.

To take advantage of this, users must register their telephone number and other contact details with an ENUM provider. Among the firms testing the technology are NeuStar, which runs the North American telephone-number system, and VeriSign, which runs the registries for domain names ending with .com and .net.

Yet ENUM is also the point where two conflicting worlds of regulation meet. Although competition is now the rule in telecoms, phone numbers themselves are still highly regulated. Domain names, on the other hand, are mostly self-regulated by web users, through ICANN, and are a profitable business for VeriSign and others.

Small wonder that the result has been friction. To minimise it, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the standards body that came up with ENUM, has proposed a compromise. In cross-border matters, the International Telecommunication Union, through which governments co-operate on telephone numbers, would be in charge. But nationally, governments would decide how much competition to allow.

So far, things have moved slowly. Some countries, such as China and France, are unhappy with the .arpa part of the proposed .arpa suffix for ENUM numbers (e164.arpa). The French perceive .arpa as controlled by America's Commerce Department, and are pushing for .int instead.

In the United States, the regulatory debate has proved even more grinding. At issue is whether there should be a master ENUM directory or several competing ones. Competition would spell chaos, says NeuStar. A call might confusingly be routed to several different telephone numbers if rival directories assigned the same number to different ENUM providers.

Not so, argues VeriSign. Not least to protect themselves against lawsuits, it says, competing ENUM registries would have an incentive to make sure that a telephone number could be registered only once, and only by its rightful owner. What is more, a government-sanctioned monopoly registry would take years to get going and be likely lead to high prices—all of which could slow the adoption of ENUM.

Neither side's arguments are without self-interest, observes David Fraley of Gartner Dataquest, a market-research firm. If America opts for a single registry, NeuStar would probably be its administrator—not just because it already runs the telephone-number system, but also thanks to its political connections (the firm was spun off by Lockheed Martin, a defence contractor, in 1999). Competition among registries would benefit VeriSign, which dominates the domain-name business.

Ultimately, Mr Fraley predicts, there will be a single, regulated registry. This, however, will not end the debate about ENUM. Already, advocacy groups are voicing strong privacy concerns. The technology, they worry, could be used to create an Orwellian universal identification number, and would allow telemarketers to bother consumers on every device. It might not be long before ENUM replaces ICANN as shorthand for frustration.