Mrs. Churchill, 35, is the director of software product management for Quiver Inc., a San Francisco company that develops Internet search and directory services for businesses.
All operating systems provide file directory services, for example, but a Microsoft system might use the same window display for a directory as for a World Wide Web browser.
The improvement in domain name prices actually began last fall, said Ben Turner, vice president for naming and directory services for Verisign, the company that manages the database of domain names ending in.com and.net and assigns numerical addresses to those names.
Not only will people be unable to find the number of anyone using Verizon Wireless as a carrier, but they will be charged a fee by the directory service for their fruitless request.
Not surprisingly, thousands of kilometers away in the English city of Norwich, when a literary agent calls directory service for directions to a restaurant, she covers the phone and complains to a friend, with an expletive: "I'm connected to an Indian call center".
Active Directory is a directory service for Windows 2000 Server, and provides a hierarchical, extensible system to organize and store user accounts and resources.
In 1999, when Niel introduced the first reverse phone directory service for Internet forerunner Minitel, France Télécom then nationalized sued Iliad for 100 million francs ($24 million-plus in todays dollars), accusing Niel of pirating its database.
Sensing a big opportunity, he returned to China, quit his teaching job, borrowed $2,000 and started one of China's first Web sites, a directory service for Chinese businesses seeking overseas orders.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a special kind of distributed directory service for people to create and access the network information systems by (1) allowing local control of its segments and (2) making each segment's data available on the Internet using a client server scheme.
"The degree of frustration I think is the issue," said Trip Agerton, who oversees the directory service operators for the BellSouth Corporation, the main phone company in the Southeast.
Since last year, though, with a decline in demand for traditional directory services, carriers have been discussing the idea of such a service.
