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Comment by godzillabrennus | Hacker News Reader

I owned a hosted PBX company from 2007-2011 and was amazed with how antiquated the port request system truly is.

The problem is that the phone company owns your phone number and you just get access as part of a service. Unlike a domain name where you own it.

If we change the law we'd bring more accountability.

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To be fair, you really don't own a domain. You still rely on the TLD honoring your purchase and not hand it over to someone else in the same way you rely on the phone company to treat your number as yours.

In the same way that you rely on a county deed office to own your land. The only difference is the amount of legal precedence in place and physical occupancy, neither which can be solved with the wave of a hand.

Some domain registrars are so completely incompetent (ie Dotster), I'm disappointed they're still in business. Literally clueless "customer support" staff that either don't auth (experienced that personally), or refuse to follow the written rules to everyone's detriment.

Recent example:

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-13657

Note - Don't use Dotster (specifically) for your domains. If you're using them now, switch away. Saying that because if you experience any trouble with your domains, you'll be wanting to contact competent staff who can fix problems. Dotster's can't. :(

At least you have a legal path:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/201...

Not exactly an easy thing to do with a phone number.

This needs to change as well. We nee to do away with the concept of a select few TLDs, indeed we need to scrap payed for subdomains/domains in general.

"was amazed with how antiquated the port request system truly is"

Absolutely. In the UK, I could easily port someone or many someone's landline number and slap a trunk on it. Sadly though I would also end up paying the bill for it. However its much easier to simply fake your outbound CLID to show the call centre you are the mark.

I have no numbers for this but I'll bet that CLID is used by banks etc as part of the security checks for your identity.

In this case it's better for us all to move away from centralized numbers, not simply regulate them better.

There are many, better and more secure options for communicating these days.

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