Over the last few years I have come to dread one piece of technology more than any other. The phone in my house is just plain evil. It interrupts my dinner, my evening entertainment, and even on days when I sleep in, the phone still rings and rings. Eight times out of ten, it ends up being a telemarketer wanting to sell me something or have me upgrade my debt ratio on my Visa. In my online time, I run into more and more spam and after a while, I have now become immune to most advertisements, except of course those tempting junk food commercials that they pass constantly on television. I don’t want a hamburger with extra cheese, but for some reason I have the urge to buy one. Anyway, the one idea that I ran across had to do with email authentication. It is based on the receiver giving permission to receive emails from you first before you can really send anything to that email address. What a great idea for the phone system. Why should I have to pay for CallerID, when 80% of the time I don’t really want those phone calls anyway?

The perfect phone system would require you to either approve the phone number or user id of the person calling you in order for your phone to accept the phone call. This would work out well because I could allow parents to call me based on their phone number, and friends who want to call me can just let me know what their user ID would be. Everyone has some sort of online ID nowadays, many people even use their online ID in person. Lastly if I wanted to I could still accept the call regardless of the phone number or ID. Government agencies would be exempt, so their calls would still come through. As for credit card companies, when you activate their card, it would add that credit card’s ID to your phone, so that the credit card company could still call you in case they needed to for non-telemarketing purposes.

This would effectively kill all telemarketing and would change the industry overnight. The business community would of course object and never let this happen, but think about it, the phone is outdated and like it or not, as everyone begins to embrace IP phone service and other communication mediums, it is just a matter of time. Someone will invent an authentication system and private networks will spring up and it may become popular for people to only communicate on private networks that have authentication. A system is only as popular as its users. If people abondon the phone system in favor of their own private telephone system, they can define their own authentication and not even have to pay extra for it.

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