NumberBarn Plan Sees Broad Opposition

from phone companies and sell them to customers (see 2411120066). “The Commission should defer any action on NumberBarn’s application until it can complete an audit of NumberBarn’s practices and address the other compliance concerns raised by the comments filed in this proceeding,” NARUC said in reply comments posted Monday in docket 19-99. It cited comments that state regulators from California, Maine, New Hampshire, Washington, West Virginia and the District of Columbia filed last month. There hasn’t been a numbering audit of a telecom carrier or VoIP provider “in at least 15 years and NumberBarn’s business practices provide an obvious target for investigation,” NARUC said. NumberBarn defended its business model. The company “is not ‘hoarding’ or ‘warehousing’ numbers; it provides a search engine for numbers available from wholesale carriers,” it said in the filing. “These numbers are unassigned numbers made available by carriers to their thousands of wholesale customers (of which NumberBarn is one), on a first come, first served basis, and NumberBarn does not have exclusive access to these numbers.” NumberBarn said state PUC concerns that it could “cause or exacerbate number exhaust [are] ... speculative and unsupported by any factual data.” Public interest and consumer groups also raised concerns in reply comments. “The multiple comments filed by state governmental entities responsible for regulating utilities and protecting consumers in their jurisdiction describe numerous problems with NumberBarn’s practices and its application,” the groups said: “All of these state commissions are unanimous in their request that NumberBarn’s application be rejected because it is not in the public interest.” The National Consumer Law Center, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Consumer Action, the National Consumers League and Public Knowledge signed the filing.