[alister]

> we cannot lookup a phone number on the internet with accuracy and ease

I wondered the same thing and just to speculate, here's my list of reasons on why phone number search is so awful:

- As far as I know, not a single cell phone carrier publishes a telephone directory (whether opt-in or opt-out). So there's no (public) data to index.

- Some landline carriers still publish telephone directories, but of course landlines are dying out. And I remember reading that 30-50% of landline subscribers choose to be unpublished or unlisted anyway. So that source of phone number data is drying up.

- Because international phone calls have become so cheap and caller ID is now easily spoofable, spam and scam calls have become huge. So no one wants their phone number to publicly accessible these days.

- In the early web years, there were legitimate phone directory websites who appeared to have collected their data from landline telephone directories and "city directories" (if anyone still remembers those things). But I guess they didn't find a good way to monetize the service, so the honest phone lookup sites died off.