Over at Sightline, Clark Williams-Derry is declaring war on the white pages. You remember the white pages, right? Those thick phone books that thud onto everyone’s doormat each year. In the age of Google and unlisted cell phones, phone books are used less and less: One Gallup survey found that, in 2008, just 11 percent of households relied on them. Yet the vast majority of states still have laws mandating their delivery.
The annual paperweight stockpile accumulates. ( Jason Meredith ) That’s led to one of those rare-but-striking points of agreement between conservatives and greens. Groups on the right, like the Heartland Institute, don’t like the undue regulations on businesses. Heartland’s Ken Braun groused last year that, in Michigan alone, the local AT&T affiliate must print and deliver 1.5 billion pages each year — a pile of phone books nine times the height of Mount Everest — “regardless of whether the customers want it, just because the government says so.”
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via Is it time to kill off the phone book? – The Washington Post.