But realistically what happens is, e.g., each franchisee wants us to treat phone number differently than eachother. USA wants no country code. Europe does. Japan wants strict number validation. Taiwan doesn't care. And so on.
At the end of the day it all gets stored as a simple string in the database, and there's software other companies have written that can set it to whatever the hell they want so we have to handle that anyways.
Really all I need is a simple string and a validation function.