Thanks to a cooperation with the registrars GoDaddy and eNorm, Google is now also selling domains. At the moment this service is limited to .com, .org, .net, .biz, .info domains and comes at a cost of 10 US-dollar a year. Included therein is the possibility to use a privacy-service which replaces the Whois-entries with an anonymous address. Additionally to the domain you will also get a bunch of Google-application: GMail, GTalk, Calendar and Page Creator.
Knowing Google has already been an ICANN-registrar since January of 2005, this step was expected for a while. It is interesting though that Google is not using their own membership for the processing but assigns partners to do so. So we can speculate that the access to domain data from the ICANN-membership might be serving a different purpose.
