More on Google Registrar

Datamonitor: “Google would be able to use [its accreditation] to see which names actually do drop and a re-registered. It would then be able to reset the PageRank for that domain, meaning the new registrant would have to start marketing the site from a clean slate.”

Now this sounds like a plausible explanation for Google’s recent accreditation. If true, it serves as a great example of how the market will tend to regulate itself despite the best intentions of the regulator. If Google starts resetting page-rank, the resale value of many of the domain names fueling the secondary market will, I expect, become essentially nil. I’d also expect Google to wipe other parts of their index as well – like the Image and PageCache.