What’s black and white and read all over? Not the white pages, which is why regulators have begun granting telecommunications companies the go-ahead to stop mass-printing residential phone books, a musty fixture of Americans’ kitchen counters, refrigerator tops and junk drawers.
According to The Associated Press, in the past month alone, New York, Florida and Pennsylvania approved Verizon Communications’s request to quit distributing residential white pages.
Telephone companies argue that most consumers now check the Internet rather than flip through pages when they want to reach out and touch someone.
Unlike the residential white pages, the business directories printed on yellow pages are doing fine, at least according to the Yellow Pages Association.
The industry trade group claims more than half the people in the U.S. still let their fingers do the walking every month, and that 550 million residential and business directories are still printed every year.
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