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.

Because

1. When the internet was rolling out, a decentralized, open, best-effort solution of TCP/IP thankfully won over telephone companies' centralized system proposal
2. IPv6 is still not universal for some damn reason
3. Onion addresses solve these problems but good luck getting everyone aboard with Tor
4. You always trade anonymity for reachability, and with the amount of threats, NAT and firewalls have been put up to make it harder for unsolicited requests to reach you by default

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.

You have some misconceptions about how phone numbers actually work. I'd say the closest thing to a phone number computers have is a domain name.

IPv4 used to hand out uniquely addressable IP addresses to every computer. Then IPv4 ran out of address space too fast, because it was too successful and blocks of millions of IP addresses were sold off in the first few years to big companies, and IPv6 was invented. Unfortunately, early IPv6 lacked a lot of features and NAT trash become the norm instead.

With IPv6, every household can have a couple billion IP addresses. It's very hard to run out of IPv6 addresses. With modern IPv6 privacy enhancements, you typically have multiple addresses (a static one for receiving traffic and a bunch of random ones for outgoing traffic so you can't get tracked as easily) with at least one derived from your network adapter's MAC address.

Computer connected to cell networks (embedded LTE modems and such) actually have phone numbers. Most of the time they're just administrative numbers that don't do anything, but they're still there.

You do seem to have some misconceptions about phone numbers, though. They can be spoofed easily, for one. They can also be shared between hundreds of people (your average call center) or exist but be unroutable. They're not tied to your SIM at all, they're actually tied to your current session (which is derived from identifiers such as IMEI and IMSI, the latter of which can be dynamic, the former of which can be spoofed). You also don't own a phone number; your carrier does, and many offer portability, but you don't own the number yourself.

In theory they can even be duplicate: phone numbers in two countries can be exactly the same. You'd say "but there's a country code prefix", but the prefix you need to add in front of a phone number is different for every country. In most of the world, prepending a call with "00" (aka "+", in the +12223334445 phone numbers) followed by a country code will make an international number, but in some countries, you would dial the American number "222 333 4445" by calling "810 1 222 333 4445" while in most of the world that'd be "00 1 222 333 4445". This makes international phone numbers variable, depending on where the other party is calling from, and introduces potential conflicts. Consider a country where the IDD is 810: someone could theoretically have a local phone number "00 1 222 333 4445", which looks like an North American international phone number, but isn't!

Most web developers assume the IDD is always +/00 and that's wrong. An international phone number is not always reachable through a 00 prefix and if you write a dialer, you'll end up calling different people depending on what country you run your dialer in.

You also don't need a phone number to call another phone in internet telephony. Sending a couple of SIP packets to the right IP address can set up a call to many home lines without paying a dime to any carrier, for instance. To do so, you need to know the IP address and SIP user of the remote party (typically a "land-line" modem) and the remote side needs to not have firewalled off their SIP port, but there are many cases in which you can enter [email protected] into dialer software and call someone without even having a phone number of your own.

As for your edits:

• the privacy nightmare still exists in IPv6 without privacy extensions

• dynamic phone numbers are completely possible, just not common

• MAC addresses are more akin to IMEI numbers. IP addresses are more akin to IMSI numbers

The closest thing to a phone number for computers is probably a domain name: something someone can reserve, gets routed to the right session (IMSI), and can be shared, non-existent, and spoofed. It's registered with a service provider for routability (whoever sets up DNS servers) just like with phone numbers (phones don't have DNS, but SS7 access will allow you to make a phone number reachable even if you don't own it!).

Unlike phone networks, computers don't need domain names to address each other. We've mostly skipped the "paying money to register a name" part of computer networks because we didn't need to. For some applications, like email, XMPP/Matrix, and the Fediverse, this was very much necessary; for machine to machine interaction, it apparently wasn't.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

a) what the hell is ipv32?

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

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?

Who is gonna assign it? There is no one central authority who decides who gets a computer number or not.