Friday, February 14, 2003

Read past the headline and you find there is simply "a recent internal letter" which means they're simply thinking out loud about it. U.S. backs merging Net, phone numbers. The Bush administration is lending its support to an international proposal to map telephone numbers to Internet addresses. By Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com. [CNET News.com] In a recent internal letter, the Commerce Department recommended that the United States participate in an emerging electronic numbering system, known as ENUM, that will allow people to use one identifier for many different purposes, including mobile phones, e-mail, instant messaging and faxes. ENUM is designed to accelerate the convergence of the telephone network and the Internet and is expected to offer a huge boost to online telephony services. Ok, it's become official U.S. gets behind ENUM Net phone initiative [InfoWorld: Top News] In a letter posted to the U.S. Commerce Department's Web site Wednesday, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Administrator Nancy Victory wrote to the U.S. Department of State saying that ENUM "has the potential to facilitate convergence of communications networks by linking e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, fax numbers and cell phone numbers for individuals or businesses." 3:16:46 AM

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