Regulations on Hoarding and Brokering are really for phone companies more than end users.
I actually wrote this article while our website was held hostage a couple months ago and went to link to it from the previous story and realized I had never posted it. The previous article about 400,000 number being sucked up by one phone company in one month is a perfect example of what I was talking about. I don’t know why they took them or any of the story behind that, so this article isn’t written about that, but it certainly relates.
Someone asked a question that I thought was smart because it brought out a very interesting point. Yes, there are regulations against hoarding and brokering toll free numbers. And this is often used as a way to scare customers and make them think that they’re not allowed to sell their number. That isn’t what the language of the regulation says because it’s not targeted toward customers. I believe the regulation about hoarding and brokering was originally written with phone companies in mind, not customers.
Think about it. How much damage would it do if the phone companies took all of the good numbers before end users had any chance to get them, and were selling or brokering them to the highest bidder? Then think about how damaging it would be if customers were allowed to buy and sell their numbers openly? There’s absolutely no comparison. Phone companies hoarding and brokering is clearly the real threat.
Guess what’s happening? Phone companies are being allowed to hoard and broker numbers openly in many cases. They go after numbers without any end user request for the express purpose of collecting numbers that they think someone will request. They use shared use and misdial marketing as excuses to suck up literally every decent number the second it hits the available pool.
Now they’re hoping to do that to the new 855 numbers. If customers don’t give their requests to their phone company ahead of time, the phone companies that don’t wait for customer requests, that just want everything good will wind up with the lions share and the consumer will lose. That’s why we’re building a request process for 855 numbers to give actual customers a better chance to compete. Most phone companies don’t have and may not build a system to collect the numbers their customers want ahead of time. And if they wait until after the 855 numbers are released it’ll probably be too late.
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