As I have said before, the ID is an obsolete vestige of the early days of radio when equipment: interference needed to be identified and listeners often used stations hundreds of miles from their home.
Today, technology allow identification of a signal in many non-intrusive ways. And, after a half-century, American stations for the most part have realized that a name, not a bunch of letters, is a vastly better way to name a station. Interestingly, most of the world never considered call letters to be significant and there they have used station names for identification since the very early days of radio.
As the FCC seems to be be trying to remove obsolete or superseded rules, allowing some type of "hidden" ID (like the PPM identifier) rather than a verbal identifier would be a great step. TV stations can use a video display that is no intrusive; there are alternatives for radio now that we are in licensed station's one-hundredth year! Call letters are, for the most part, obsolete as an audience identifier.
For the moment, at least stations that do not use the call letters as a normal identity brand can place them where they are the least confusing and distracting.
Where calls are useful is in advertising buys as they represent a unique and standardized identifier for over 10,000 commercial stations. But then again, ad agencies in other nations do just fine buying by station name, just as they know the difference between web-based names.
