But Google is a numbers-driven company and if and when they have enough data that suggests they can make more money this way, they’ll do it and they won’t care if it pisses off their advertisers or not.

Advertisers won’t like it, they’ll bitch (rightly so) about it being unfair… and most of them will keep buying keywords anyway.

I personally like the concept of disposable phone numbers to provide consumers greater privacy and control and perhaps a solution is Jaxtr. Jaxtr is doing a solid job of penetrating social networks. I am unclear if consumers older than 27 (i.e. outside of the core social networking space) have the time or energy to go through the process of establishing a disposable phone number vs – just not answering the phone when you don’t recognize the caller’s I.D.

In either case, I am encouraged to see experimentation in Lead Generation. It is time that Lead Generation evolves. If you add Google’s experimentation with the work that Zillow previously announced with it’s mortgage marketplace (what I call “reverse LendingTree”), it appears mortgage lead generation is poised for more experimentation once the market recovers.

Google has the ability to try thing on the fly if they choose but time will tell if they take this serious or not. If they bring this to the U.S. there will be an uproar amongst advertisers and competitors. Google needs to be investigated for being a monopoly today

At the end of the day, I think google is too busy scaling internationally and building in other areas to make a real move here, but if they do it’s a game changer… in any case, it will improve the existing dire environment that the industry has create for consumers that want to get a rate quote.