You used to defraud the US Government back in the day? For pagerank? Did you get in trouble?

It was more .edu's back then, I came across more than one (presumably hacked) professors personal sites that where hosting link spam directories

If we go back to the original PageRank algorithm, I don't think it would be affected by this attack. The original algorithm just counts the number of links (or number of sites making links), not the TLDs. So a .com site would be just as good as a .gov site.

Yes but they used to had, I remember correctly higher PR. Back in the day (Twitter had 10, Google had 9 and any gov had 7 atleast) I used to buy those and link to my directory webs.