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

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A Marketplace listener asks: 

Why aren’t there “phone books” (directories) for cell phone numbers?

Finding your name and number in the phone book once meant that you had officially made it in the world. 

You see that in the film “The Jerk,” when Steven Martin’s character finds his name in the phone book and declares, “I’m somebody now,” said Stephen Minnig, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. 

“There was a point in time in the history of the country where people were kind of excited to get the phone book. What do you do when you get the phone book? You first look up and make sure that your information is correct. If you were young, that sort of made you feel like you had arrived to a certain point,” Minnig said. 

Now, the prospect of having your cell phone number publicly listed somewhere is probably very unappealing for most people. We’re constantly bombarded with spam calls and texts, and increasingly sophisticated scam calls are becoming rampant. 

The way we paid for cell service in its early years vs. landlines explains why we did not develop the equivalent of “the white pages” for cell phones.

About a century ago, the Communications Act of 1934 required phone carriers to provide people access to phone directories, Minnig said. And if you didn’t want your landline number listed in the directory, you actually had to pay the phone company to get an unlisted number, said Robert Frieden, an academy and emeritus professor of telecommunications and law at Penn State University. 

When cell phones were introduced in the U.S., not only did the person calling pay, but the people receiving the call did too, experts explained. 

“People were parsimonious with their minutes,” Frieden said. “You didn’t have this sort of unlimited, all-you-can eat pricing.” People with landline phones didn’t have to pay for receiving a call nor did they lose any allotted minutes or calls, Frieden said. 

“Cellular had some characteristics that really worked against the willingness of subscribers to have their telephone numbers and addresses recorded in a database,” Frieden explained. 

Nowadays, it’d be very difficult to implement a comprehensive phone book for wireless phones because there are over 370 million cell phone subscribers in the U.S., Minnig said. If you’re looking for John Smith, you’re going to see a lot of them out there, so it’ll be tough to find the person you’re actually looking for, he said. 

And now, it’s easy to find a person or business’ number online without the need to rifle through a directory. There are some sites that might publicly list your name and number, or charge you a fee to “unlock” a report on someone containing their personal information.

The classic, sturdy phone book lives on, though. In Philadelphia, for example, “the yellow pages” (phone directories for businesses) and “the white pages” were delivered to more than 100,000 households. The amount of printing required for phone books can result in unnecessary waste, but older and lower-income Americans who have limited internet access may need a way to look people up. There are also economic incentives at play: local businesses still want to advertise, and the phone book companies get that advertising revenue.