User identity has always been a place for big tech to be deliberately divergent from open standards because identity is one of the underlying assets for freemiu

User identity has always been a place for big tech to be deliberately divergent from open standards because identity is one of the underlying assets for freemium services. In the case of pay for identity (like phone numbers) it was guarded as a potential source of additional revenue for multiplay offerings and micropayments. A couple of decades along we’re sleepwalking into a time where our personal identity will become the property of big corporations that do not protect our privacy or interests. Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage etc use phone numbers (and email with iMessage) as a not quite anonymous “lookup key” for an identity. Perhaps now is the time to look at reinventing something like the ENUM RFC for persistent identity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping A million years ago (before hotmail or gmail) I had a bigfoot.com email address that forwarded to your actual address - maybe there is a scope for a community funded modern equivalent now that allows the creation of genuine lifelong “email” identities.