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February 13, 2004
"867-5309" up for sale

As you may know, "number portability" has arrived for mobile phones -- so that you can transfer a number from one phone to another. This has created an interesting side effect: People with particularly cool phone numbers are putting them up for sale to the highest bidder.

On Ebay today, someone is auctioning their mobile number "867-5309" -- which was, of course, made hummably famous by the Tommy TuTone hit "Jenny (867-5309)". It's available in the 212 area code. When I last checked in, the bids had hit $56,000. Holy moses.

What's particularly interesting is the attitude of the seller towards the number, as witnessed by the way she or he describes the "item":

**I currently am the owner of 212-867-5309. I will transfer the number to the highest bidder.

**Number portability has allowed me to put this up for sale.

The thing is, nobody owns their phone number. It's a piece of identifying data the phone carriers temporarily give to you, but they could revoke it at any point in time. Check your mobile-phone contract if you don't believe me. (Actually, you're carrying lots of things you don't own. That bank card in your pocket? It's the property of the bank, merely on loan to you while you have an account with them.)

But the point is, people believe that they own these things -- so they treat them like property even if they aren't. In the case of mobile numbers, this is likely to lead to some quite interesting culture clashes. What's going to happen when mobile-number auctioning becomes a really big thing? Will Verizon and Cingular and Sprint and all the other carriers suddenly go, "whoa, hold a second, we should be getting the money for these sales"? Or will they consider it a sort of unavoidable usage culture that is basically free advertising for the coolness of mobile phones? It's much like the fights that have cropped up in the world of online games like Ultima Online or Everquest, where the players began treating their virtual swords, castles and characters as a form of property, and selling them on Ebay -- utterly without the consent of the companies.

** UPDATE: As I suspected, Verizon has yanked this auction -- you can read my blog posting about it here.

Posted by Clive Thompson at February 13, 2004 10:34 AM

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In Collision Detection, Clive writes: On Ebay today, someone is auctioning their mobile number "867-5309" -- which was, of course, made hummably famous by the Tommy TuTone hit "Jenny (867-5309)". It's available in the 212 area code. When I checked in, ... [Read More]

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Comments

Dig it: Cingular is using Tommy TuTone's song Jenny (867-5309) in their advertisements which tout number portability.

Posted by: Jonathan Korman at February 13, 2004 11:36 AM

Ahahahha! How meta.

Posted by: Clive at February 13, 2004 12:12 PM

:-) (There's a big market for automible license plates too.)

Posted by: greglas at February 13, 2004 3:48 PM

Oh, cool!

Posted by: Clive at February 13, 2004 4:04 PM

Right, but isn't the user of 867-5309 free to sell what interest he _does_ have in the number? That is, he has the number until the phone company says he doesn't. The buyer is overpaying, to be sure, but he'd be getting exactly what the current user of the number had.

Posted by: JB at February 15, 2004 4:14 PM

That's right -- the seller can undoubtedly hold a transaction like this so long as they have control of the number. But you better believe by now that the phone service-provider has looked quite carefully at this and realized, holy god, that's a hell of a valuable number. They could, theoretically, "repossess" the number -- take it away from the current owner right now and give them some new, worthless number, so the phone carrier could auction off the cool number and pocket the profits themselves.

Mind you, it's unlikely they'd do that. Phone carriers have for years been reserving the really cool numbers -- ones with combinations of 000's or other digits that make them particularly easy to remember, or ones that spell out a particular corporation's name -- and selling access to them for a price. The phone guys have known for years that elite phone numbers are worth a lot.

However, they generally wouldn't pay much attention to numbers that have random cultural value, such as this Tommy Tutone one. I think things like this are the ones that slip through the cracks. But since there are millions of mobile numbers in existence, and since Ebay is a pretty easy instrument with which anyone can quickly determine the market value of a good, it wouldn't surprise me if we see even more culturally-valuable numbers emerge in the next little while.

Posted by: Clive at February 15, 2004 4:41 PM

Posted by: greglas at February 16, 2004 10:37 AM

Whoops -- got the tags mixed up. It's here: http://slashdot.org/articles/04/02/15/1339247.shtml?tid=99.

Posted by: greglas at February 16, 2004 10:39 AM

The bid now is 66,300... WOW is that something or what?

Posted by: Anonymous at February 16, 2004 4:44 PM

I almost feel like setting up a betting pool to see who can predict how high it'll go.

I'm starting to think it'll go over $100,000. What does everyone else think?

Posted by: Clive at February 16, 2004 4:48 PM

The puppets from Crank Yankers should call this fella and piss him off.

Posted by: Brian at February 17, 2004 10:10 AM

Did Ebay pull this item....its no longer listed!!!!

Posted by: debbie at February 17, 2004 6:25 PM

The item has been pulled from Ebay.

Posted by: Shawn-Kimberly at February 17, 2004 9:34 PM

LOOK OUT!

Technically, since EVERY phone number in the U.S. is a public resource, 867-5309 really belongs to the F.C.C. which absolutely prohibits the sale, brokering or leasing of a phone number.

Even 800 FLOWERS or 800 HOLIDAY does not belong to those companies, the F.C.C. owns them, those companies just get to use them.

So the F.C.C. could step in and claim the money AND the number!

Posted by: teres adams at February 19, 2004 5:27 PM

someone else has the number up for bid in the Los Angeles area-code 213 and they actually have the right to sell it. this is the link http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3802678445&category=46689

Posted by: Doug at March 11, 2004 11:33 AM

someone else has the number up for bid in the Los Angeles area-code 213 and they actually have the right to sell it. this is the link http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3802678445&category=46689

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