Comment by throwway120385
2 years ago
The legacy phone system has a lot of features that aren't present in its replacement, such as freedom to connect with anyone who has a phone number, the ability to move your phone number from carrier to carrier, and the knowledge that as an individual the phone company can't block me from contacting its subscribers entirely for free as long as I pay a fee to my own phone company.
It's way better than being on Whatsapp or iMessage or Slack or Teams or whatever you're proposing to replace it because I have a lot of control over who can contact me and nobody is using my presence on the phone network as a means to drag all of my friends over to the same phone network.
The legacy phone system currently enables breathtaking amounts of abuse and fraud. I know all the benefits you're listing, and I would enthusiastically surrender them just to watch the legacy phone system be decommissioned.
If we invented the legacy phone system today, it would be illegal to operate because it's so insecure. We certainly wouldn't dream of forcing everyone to use it.
Any replacement would have the same fraudulent traffic migrate to it.
You can already see this type of fraudulent traffic occur on Telegram with the constant crypto bots and on Signal with the romance scams.
A PSTN sunset would force this fraudulent traffic to migrate to the over the top communications platforms, eliminate many people's ability to access emergency services reliably, destroy reliable voice quality on cellular networks as there's no consistent way to prioritize third party voice and video traffic.
> Any replacement would have the same fraudulent traffic migrate to it.
We've had SSL on the web for 30 years now. We don't visit our bank's web site and wonder if we're really talking to our bank, but we casually accept that of course someone calling from our bank's phone number could be a fraudster. There might be some fraud that is able to migrate, but it wouldn't be the smorgasbord for fraudsters that the legacy phone system has created.
> eliminate many people's ability to access emergency services reliably
This is like saying that we can't put out the dumpster fire because it provides some people with warmth. The 911 system (at least in the US) is already a travesty. Caller locations are a crapshoot for wireless calls. Call centers aren't centralized, standardized, or coordinated, and they're overloaded. The technology is outdated. Moving it off the phone network and onto a centralized digital platform would be a massive improvement.
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All you would need to replace this is a messaging app that uses email addresses as identifiers and then falls back to sending messages via email if the recipient doesn't have the app.
What organization runs the messaging app? Do we have some kind of consortium of companies? And how do we add or remove companies from that list? There are actually a lot of social problems around this that are already solved by the network of arrangements between the companies that run our phone system and the users of the phone system and so on. You'd likely end up recreating that and at the end of the day you'd have rebuilt the phone system. The technical problems are a very small part of this.
No organization runs the messaging app, it's a protocol that anyone can implement. Publish an RFC. The first time you contact someone who uses a different provider, their messaging app or service sends you an email asking you to confirm that you sent the message, after which your app is associated with your email address on their provider. A combined messaging+email app could handle this automatically. At that point you can make calls, video chats, group chats, E2E encrypted direct messaging etc., using an email address as an identifier.
In general, solve problems in the same way that email does but add protocol support for realtime direct communications and end-to-end encryption.
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My understanding is that used to be how most text messaging was done pre-smartphone in Japan.
Currently the only similar thing I'm aware of is https://delta.chat/en/, though I believe it does all of its networking over email, rather than only using it as a fallback.
I wonder what the pitfalls of using email this way are; it seems like a great way to get a free backend and growth-hack a chat app, so there must be some reason it's not more common.
It's the idealist's solution because it benefits the user. Companies typically want to use phone numbers because they're more expensive for users to maintain separate identities with, which helps when you want to track them. Moreover, companies want lock-in to their own network effect, not a federated network that anybody else can permissionlessly join.
It's the sort of thing you get when somebody builds it as a hobby project, or a skunkworks project escapes from a large corporation and is already open source by the time the MBAs get their hands on it. Or, in the old days, DARPA funding.
https://delta.chat/ does this.
99 standards on the wall, 99 standards... take one down, pass it around, 101 standards on the wall.
https://xkcd.com/927/
Except that the popular messaging apps don't have published standards and you can't interoperate with them even if you wanted to. How do you implement the iMessage protocol on Android or Windows?
Point me to the existing IETF RFC for e.g. mapping email addresses as identifiers for use in a standard communications protocol for voice and video calls.
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> I have a lot of control over who can contact me
This might be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s literally legal in my country to spam me on my phone number and there is ZERO I can do to change that. Ergo I have fuck all control over who can contact me.
> freedom to connect with anyone who has a phone number
This is actually a bug, not a feature, as it enables all kind of robocalls and sms spam. That's why I love the iPhone feature that allows me to block all the calls from numbers not in my contact list. It does not allow this for SMS though...
It does allow it for SMS apparently, but the UI is easy to misunderstand. In the "Unknown & Spam" settings where you picked "Filter Unknown Senders" there is an option below it marked "SMS Filtering" and you need to set that to... "SMS Filter".
https://www.guidingtech.com/how-to-block-text-messages-from-...
Even if it couldn't do this, that would just bolster the case that Apple is making SMS worse than it has to be on their platform to promote iMessage and its network effects.
EDIT: I booted up my iPhone 14 on the latest iOS and I guess this has changed? There isn't a "SMS Filtering" option near the Filter Unknown Senders option which has moved to the top level Messages settings page versus when the guide was written.
I'm not sure if that means it always filters SMS or it never does, but again if it doesn't filter SMS at all that's an Apple choice, it doesn't mean you can't do it on SMS.
When I was on Android it did allow me to do this for SMS.