There's No Such Thing as a Free Web

Posted by: Monica Gagnier on July 27

Like many other people, I threw away my phone books around 1999. I’ve never liked clutter, and I figured I could get any phone number I wanted by looking it up on the Web.

I hate to pay for anything I can get for free even if it saves me time. As a result, I’ve trained myself not to call directory assistance unless there’s absolutely no way around it.

This system has served me well for about 10 years. Occasionally, I find the Web steers me wrong as advertisers have “hijacked” phone listings. For instance, the phone number listed on one Web site for Chrysler dealer Healey Brothers in Fishkill, N.Y., connected me to an auto loan company where a tape recording informed me about low-interest rate loans on Chrysler vehicles. (I redialed and got the same result.)

This prompted me to fish around for an old receipt, which had the number of Healey’s repair department listed on it. I tacked it up on my bulletin board so I would have it the next time I needed to take the car in for a tune-up.

It’s been a while since I looked up a residential number on whitepages.com. Last week, I was surprised when I was asked to create a login with my e-mail address and a password in order to look up my neighbor’s phone number. (I could see his name and street address without creating the login.)

This was new to me. I remember being able to view a phone number from whitepages.com on my computer screen without the rigmarole, but it’s been awhile since I consulted the site.

I was so annoyed at the inconvenience of having to create a login that I walked over to my neighbor’s house and knocked on the door to ask about a power washer that I had lent the family last summer and forgotten about. Maybe that’s the silver lining in this story — the higher barriers to entry on the Web will get us back to human interaction.

I wonder how long it’s going to be before I have to plug in my credit-card number in order to get a residential or commercial phone number.

I imagine it will be “subscription” service: All I’ll have to do is pay $5 or $10 a year and I can look up all the phone numbers I want. Then I’ll be paying for information I used to get for free. That’s called a “business model,” my friends.

The next time a phone book lands on my front steps, I’m going to pick it up and keep it in the kitchen drawer the way I used to in the last century.