[teddyh]

A carfax report lists issues with the actual car. You don’t want a car with “car exploded” in the carfax report, since this would translate to actual damage in the car, damage which could actually affect you if you were to drive the car.

On the other hand, a domain reputation at Google et al. is more like Carfax reporting “This car was once parked at the same street where a horrific mass murder took place.” If this was a problem since, let’s assume for the sake of argument, the police would pull you over all the time if you drove it, it would still not be a problem with the actual car; the problem would be the police, and fixing police behavior would be the only workable solution. Using Carfax as an analogy still places the blame on the domain owner, not on Google et al.

[perching_aix]

But in this scenario there are many more parties involved than just "the police". So you can't "just fix the police behavior" for a "solution". You'd have to "fix" any and every party that already exists or pops up in the future.

This kind of issue is inherent to any system where identifiers are recycled, particularly when that recycling happens on demand. It's not "fixable", at best it's combatable. And trying to language police away the symptom and blaming it all on the pivotal participants supports and achieves neither.

[teddyh]

The analogy is not perfect, but there aren’t myriads of parties, there’s basically only Google, plus a handful of others of greatly decreasing importance.

If it was a reputation problem where, say, end clients with web browsers would each have a separate and uniquely derived negative opinion about domain names, this would indeed be a “bad reputation” problem and not a Google problem, since the problem could not be fixed at the Google side. But with domain reputation being so centralized, the problem is at the center.