No Stupid Questions

Well, phone numbers do get re-assigned too.

They do, it's called an IP address.

Phones get numbers assigned to them by a cell service provider, in order to communicate on their network, which is basically the exact process for computers and IP addresses.

If you're asking about the equivalent of like a SIM card, in the computer/internet world, that's handled at higher layers, by digital certificates. And again, the process is almost exactly the same, except they don't (usually) get put on physical chips.

Isn’t that what a MAC address is? There is a few ways to ch age it unless that’s been fixed iirc.

Lack of demand.

Phones having unique unalterable numbers was never an intentional feature desired by users, just a limitation of the available technology.

Computer network cards do have such a number, their MAC address, but modern ones can scramble it to avoid being tracked, without any loss of ability to be reached by everyone you want to be reached by.

Along with the other comments on UDID, IMEI and MAC, I’d just like to point out that phones don’t have phone numbers.

On land lines, the number is assigned to the line that goes to your house from the local operations center; on mobile phones, the number is linked by your carrier to THEIR SIM card that you stick in your phone.

eSIM almost gets there; instead of a physical card linked to the phone number, all the logic and secrets are stored in a secure enclave on your phone and THAT is linked to the number, which is in a directory managed by your carrier. It’s linked to the phone itself because of the phone’s IMEI.

MAC's used to be static, but then hackers found ways to spoof it. Now manufacturers don't care to make them static anymore.

Get a laptop with a SIM and you will have an IMEI and phone number, plus 5G.

That would be a privacy nightmare.

It’s called a MAC address.

The problem with it is mostly routing.

The osi model has 7 layers of connection to form a proper internet connection.

The MAC address exists but doesn’t leave the physical network. The MAC address is used to physically connect your computer to the router, and it defines your piece of hardware.

The IP address can change, because your computer can connect to different networks.

If you tried to route everything with a MAC address, (which isn’t possible, but for arguments sake we will pretend it is) the problem is that when you take your phone with its MAC address off your wifi and on to your work wifi, Where would the registry be? How would the Internet know how to find your phone? Do you just log into one giant global registry so that everyone can find your phone when they are trying to communicate with it? That would be a giant fucking database and everyone would always be trying to use it.

Routing is a big and complex problem, and these things didn’t work with ipv4

They do work better with IPv6. IPv6 adresses don’t need to change like ipv4 for a bunch of reasons.

From a philosophical level, the Internet was designed for people to be anonymous and make relatively anonymous connections. You wanted to be flexible enough that you can just be assigned a new number and work with that new number quickly.

This is a really simple explanation, and I got some basic facts wrong just for ease of understanding, but the principals are correct.

Intel tried this on the Pentium 3, we all hated it so they stopped.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_III#Controversy_about_privacy_issues

You seem to have be missing a fundamental thing about tech but I can't pin down what it is. So I will respond to your edits.

but I can't buy a static address that will persist across networks endpoint changes

You can. It's called Provider Independent Space and it a pain to go with as an individual.

Yes, it would be a privacy nightmare, I want to know why it didnt turn out that way

Because people smarter than you, I, and everyone else in this post said 'Yes EUI-64 is a good idea in principe but the problems on a privacy perspective outweigh the advantages. So let's build a system called MAC randomisation so people can get multiple address to access the internet with. '
The good news is you can turn off MAC randomisation.

AFAIK IP addresses (even static public ones) are not equivlent to phone numbers. I don't get a new phone number every time I connect to a new cell tower

In some parts of the world or before 2000 if you changed mobile providers, say from Vodafone to Telstra you had to get a new number. Since that change number routing has become a nightmare and it makes the BGPv4 table look sane in comparison.

Even if a static IP is assigned to a device, my understanding is that connecting the device to a new uncontrolled WiFi, especially a router with a NAT, will make it so that people who try to connect to the static IP will simply fail.

This is a complex one due to NAT in the ipv4 space. NAT exists purely to allow devices to have the same private IPv4 address and hide behind a public v4 address.

No, MAC addresses are not equivalent phone numbers. 1. Phone numbers have one unique owner, MAC addresses can have many owners because they can be changed at any time to any thing on most laptops. 2. A message can't be sent directly to a MAC address in the same way as a phone number

1. MAC do have unique owner blocks. Cisco somewhat owned the 0000.0C block.
2. Yes you can. That is literally how it works down the TCP/IP stack.

Yes, IMEI is unique, but my laptop doesn't have one and even if it did its not the same as an eSim or sim card. We can send a message to an activated Sim, we can't send a message to an IMEI or serial number

If your laptop has a regular Sim slot it will have an IMEI. True we can't send messages via IMEI or serial because those systems were never designed for message routing.

IMEI numbers for phones are more unique than phone numbers.

• No, MAC addresses are not equivalent phone numbers. I can't edit my phone number for free in 30sec to whatever I want, and I can't send a message to a MAC address.

You sure about that?

What makes you think all phones have unique numbers? Some have no direct dial numbers.

As for each device getting a unique IP address this is somewhat in the spec for EUI-64 IPv6 address. Your IP is based on your interfaces MAC address but this becomes a privacy nightmare.

If the MAC address's of the wifi chip in your phone is 1122.3344.5566 your IPv6 address at home can be 2001:0db8:0000:00000:1122:33ff:fe44:5566 but when at work your address may be 2001:db8:1000:0000:1122:33ff:fe44:5566. No matter where you connect to the last 4 sections of the address is the same and companies will use that as one of the data points of your digital profile.

Phone numbers aren't exactly unique. It's really not much different than being assigned a static IP address from your ISP. They're assigned and if a line is cancelled or you change your number, it goes to a dormant state for a while then is reassigned to someone else.

Your phone's IMEI on the other hand is a unique number, similar to a MAC address for network devices. Unlike a MAC though, it is illegal to spoof or clone an IMEI. Infrastructure however wasn't designed to use the IMEI or MAC as the publicly accessible address, it was designed with a middle translation layer in mind.

Not 100% sure, my early history is lacking a bit, but I think that was simply because the fundamental network design underlying everything we use predates unique identifiers like MAC addresses existing.

its not the same as an eSim or sim card

I think you have part of your answer.
Get a laptop with a SIM Card reader, and do what you may.

The reason it doesn't work with IP is because, it started out with local networks and was expanded from that. A domain name is similar to a phone number, just that the user has the IP routing information available, whereas in case of phone connection, a probably similar system for routing is all abstracted by cell exchanges.

P.S. Thanks for the food for thought.

a) what the hell is ipv32?

b) it’s astounding how many upvotes some of these nonsensical answers have

Notwithstanding the instant privacy nightmare this would create, essentially abolishing online anonymity overnight, this is kinda-sorta what MAC addresses are already. As to why MAC addresses can be spoofed so easily without any real impact on anything, refer to my first statement.

I haven't read all of the replies to see if somebody else had said this, but it's because the Internet was designed to be completely decentralized, whereas the phone system requires your line or device to be registered with the network operator(s). Any device that can get a valid Internet address for the local network can communicate with the whole Internet, but a phone will only work if it's explicitly known by the phone service provider, and that information shared to all providers.

We could set up a system, layered on top of the Internet, by which each computer could register itself in a central directory each time it connects, and thus be reachable at the same address no matter where it connects, even on a NAT connection. In fact, it's easy to do with a VPN and Dynamic DNS (both of which require the cooperation some centralized authority). It's just not universal, because, well, what's the utility of doing so?

Every land-line phone I've had didn't carry it's number with it. The number is assigned to a fixed, immovable address. Back then it was part of a physical switching system - in the switching center, shafts would move up and down and rotate to connect one circuit to another. These were circuit-switched networks. (These were eventually replaced by digital switches).

The only number that's static on my cell phone is the EID, because it's necessary with a mobile device connecting to a radio-based network. The system needs to know how to route a connection whenever the phone moves - "which tower is it on" - which is handled by the device registering with the tower, the network then updates it's database. The phone number with a cell phone is specifically for routing user connections (essentially tells the system what subscriber is associated with a given endpoint - your phone).

None of this is required for internet connections, as you get connectivity via a router which is the Internet-facing address for other devices to see. Things were established this way initially because there's no need for an endpoint device to be directly exposed (plus hardware and software capabilities at the time).

Also, I hope to never see the day when all consumer endpoint devices are directly on the internet. That's a bad idea in so many ways (and why I argue IPv6 is generally useless for endpoint consumer devices). IP6 is great for plenty of other reasons.