Not if I take my sim card and put it in another phone, or call my service provider to cancel my service and then they reuse the number for a new client.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but phone numbers, domain names, and ip addresses are all references that requiere looking up in some table (think routing tables for ip addresses and, I imagine, phone numbers).
You're right, phone numbers aren't fixed. I went too far slipping that one in. My apologies.
However...
I generally don't remap remote phone numbers on my own equipment at home. I'm sure I could run an Asterisk PBX, but that's at least one level of complication harder than using a hosts file. The phone system is designed for companies to talk to one another, the internet is basically designed to allow distributed authority and control.
Hackers have spent decades hacking into the telephone system to make it work more like the internet, before there was even an internet to resemble.
And the internet is agnostic, it will absolutely let you give up control to a remote authority over some aspects of its operation, like for DNS or certificates or DDoS mitigation, and sometimes that's a good trade. But it's never obligatory.
So the two converge and overlap, but I stand by my point that there's a fundamental difference stemming from original design and philosophy.
Actually no, the whole point of number portability in the north american numbering plan is that they don't, allowing the end-user of a phone number to move it from one service provider to another as they please.
For example from an MVNO riding on AT&T to T-Mobile, or from a Telus landline POTS number to a pure-voip SIP trunking/DID-termination provider.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_number_portability
this would be logically similar to transferring a domain from one registrar to another, while the ownership info remains the same. It's hard to make an exact analogy, but what carrier a number goes to in the number portability system is not extremely dissimilar from what authoritative nameservers are entered for the ns1/ns2/ns3 for a typical .com domain.
- that person gets a new phone
- a hacker politely calls customer support and asks to have a new phone activated on that number
- the area code is split and someone else ends up getting the number
One important one is “customer ports the number to a different carrier”.
by no means does a phone number mean that it must always go to a mobile phone network.
The internet is deeply democratic, maybe anarchic -- whatever rules I want my machine to follow it follows. If people generally disagreed with this decision, a viral hosts file would roll it back.
(I don't think this so alarming a case that it will spawn a movement, but that response is available.)
.onion and namecoin and various others are a wholecloth attempt at this.
But it goes farther than hosts and alt roots. One of the unique properties of the internet is that if it gets overburdened with cruft people don't like, we can just build it from scratch on top of existing systems.
There are infinite namespaces. You could build a copy of the Internet that's the same but with no Facebook. You could build a copy of the internet where all domains are mapped right to left. You could build a copy of the internet that only hosts MUDs.
Adoption isn't guaranteed, or even likely, but maybe widespread adoption is part of the problem you're running from in the first place.
Here's to the dystopia of unregulatable and unusable internet fragmentation. Some pros, some cons.