Phone Numbers and Email Addresses

Accoriding to this article the White House is backing a plan to associate phone numbers with internet-related addresses using DNS. I read the RFC and it basically introduces a new record to DNS, the NAPTR record, as well as defining a new domain, E164.arpa, to which a phone number including area code and international code will be reversed, dotted between all digits, and prepended.

This is an interesting idea, but I’m having difficulty identifying how it will be implemented. First of all, how on earth will they populate the records? There are so many throw-away addresses out there. It’s possible to let people and companies enter their own information, but trying to do that securely seems extremely difficult. Second, what will prevent spammers and other evils from harversing all the information they can from the NAPTR records? Who will have access to this, the government, large corporations? It appears to be an international effort, so who’s running it?

I’m pretty sceptical about this in several ways. There seem to be a lot of clouds in the diagram.