A Reuters report at
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=582&e=3&cid=582&u=/nm/20030213/wr_nm/tech_enum_dc starts with:
"The U.S. government on Thursday threw its weight behind an emerging standard that could simplify personal communications by providing a single point of contact for telephone and Internet communications."
This sounds intriguing, and as the article points out, we'll need a serious consideration of spam/privacy laws before this would make any sense from a user point of view. Who really wants spammers to be able to flood you with unwanted recorded messages, SMS phone text messages, or pages? Actually, this sounds like a really good idea, as this new method of contact will probably be designed to protect against abuse from the ground up, in which case many people could screen all contact through this number.