Death of the phone number?

David Marcus, a Facebook VP, just published an article suggesting that the phone number is redundant. His solution - Facebook Messenger of course.

Promoting of Messenger aside, it kind of makes sense. Think about it - we get a unique personal identifier at birth (usually) - it's called our name. What's the point of having another identifier of numeric characters?

Chord cutting, number portability and the profileration of OTT services point to the phone number becoming redundant.

Mind you - not sure about putting control in the hands of Facebook.