Why don’t we have a phone book for mobile phones?

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A Marketplace listener asks:

Why are there no “phone books” (directories) for mobile phone numbers?

Once you found your name and number in the phone book, it meant you had officially made it in the world.

You see this in the movie “The Jerk,” when Steven Martin’s character finds his name in the phone book and declares, “Now I’m somebody,” says Stephen Minnig, an associate professor at Georgetown University.

“There was a time in the history of the country when people were excited to get the phone book. What do you do when you get the phone book? You look it up and make sure the information is correct. When you were young, you felt like you had reached a certain point,” Minnig said.

The idea of ​​having your cell phone number out there in the open is probably very unattractive for most people. We are constantly bombarded with spam calls and SMS, and sophisticated scam calls are on the rise.

The way we paid for mobile versus landline telephony in the early years explains why we did not develop an equivalent of the “phone book” for mobile phones.

About a century ago, the Communications Act of 1934 required telephone companies to give people access to phone books, Minnig said. And if you didn’t want your landline number listed in the directory, you actually had to pay the phone company money to get a secret number, said Robert Frieden, professor emeritus of telecommunications and law at Penn State University.

When cell phones were introduced in the United States, not only the caller paid, but also the called party, experts explained.

“People were stingy with their minutes,” Frieden said. “There were no unlimited, all-you-can-eat prices.” People with landlines didn’t have to pay to receive a call, nor did they lose allotted minutes or calls, Frieden said.

“Mobile communications had some characteristics that severely affected subscribers’ willingness to have their phone numbers and addresses recorded in a database,” Frieden explained.

Today, it would be very difficult to create a comprehensive cell phone directory because there are over 370 million cell phone subscribers in the U.S., Minnig said. If you search for John Smith, you’ll find a lot of them, so it’ll be difficult to find the person you’re actually looking for, he said.

And today, it’s easy to find a person’s or business’s phone number online without having to dig through a phone book. There are some websites that will list your name and number publicly or charge you a fee to unlock a report on a person that includes their personal information.

The classic, robust phone book lives on, however. In Philadelphia, for example, the Yellow Pages (business phone directories) and White Pages have been distributed to over 100,000 homes. The expense of printing phone books can create unnecessary waste, but older and low-income Americans who have limited Internet access may need a way to look up people. There are economic incentives, too: Local businesses want to continue to advertise, and the phone book companies get that advertising revenue.