Past few years, Ive been getting three or four phone books a year, all from different publishers selling listings to a growing marketplace of advertisers. Some have white pages, some don’t. Each covers different geographical areas. None are complete anymore, as local businesses refuse to buy space from every phone book salesman who walks in the door.
That’s the same problem we now have with directory websites.
A paid-for directory is what economists call a “natural monopoly”; a good or service where a single supplier is the most economically efficient option. But absent the regulations to make it an actual monopoly, it’ll devolve into the much less efficient cacophony of competing suppliers for functionally identical goods.
There are other reasons, too. For example, I recently was part of organizing a reunion for my grade school class which involved finding people that we hadn’t seen or heard from in 40 years. ( I don’t know how people did it in the days of paper directories, but the online white pages were very helpful. And the “full profile” listing gives you the names of associated people and the persons age,so it was easier to tell if you found the right person) ) And I have a lot of relatives who I basically never talk to on the phone, but I occasionally need their phone number or address to pass on funeral information or to send an party invitation*. Although I keep the addresses/phone numbers once I find them, people move and change their phone numbers so the info I have from a couple of years ago is often out of date.
- It’s not that I’m inviting people I have no contact with - I see them in person a few times a year in addition to keeping in touch on Facebook , but we have no reason to be constantly updating each other on new addresses or phone numbers.
I wish the people I needed to look up were on Verizon.