See, you can say this like it's a bad thing, but the concept of phone numbers is /retarded/. Why should you have to know some arcane, difficult to remember internal routing ID of a phone subscriber just to call them? It's like, instead of having DNS, you have to put in every IP address manually for any server/website you wish to visit. Sure, you can have a phone book, but this is like just putting an entry in /etc/hosts; it's definitely a horrible solution to a now-solved problem.
If the Senate had banned phone numbers, that would have forced the phone companies to create something better. A kind of Telephone Name Service of sorts.