So I did a little more research into the gottlieb.* domain names. I had considered something along those lines before ending up with malkier.com since all the appropriate gottlieb stuff was taken. Most are held by legitimate parties (ie people/businesses with the name gottlieb), but gottlieb.net is actually being squatted on by a rather shifting looking domain service, buydomains.com. Turns out these scumbags run around buying up domains with the hopes that someone would buy them for a pretty penny. For example, when I checked out their “request price” form, by submitting the form you are agreeing that you would be willing to spend at least $1k on the domain and possibly well over $10k. Not sure quite what that means (aside from the fact that they’re doing their best to milk businesses for all their worth) since you’re not agreeing to actually buy it if it’s at their $1k minimum.
After googling a bit, I see that this place is even scummier than all that. Turns out if you search for available domain names through their site, they’ll promptly buy up everything you search for in the hopes that you’ll buy it off them. They’ll also automatically jack up the price once anyone’s expressed any interest in a particular domain. Stinky buggers! But who knows, I may one day be able to snag that domain if they don’t renew it when it expires…
that reminds me of this service that i used when i was a freshman that registered kujoth.com for me for free. it was essentially lilke dyndns.org, except for free registration…then after a year of that, they said it was turning into a pay service. i, of course, didn’t pay them…but they kept the domain registered for 2 or 3 years after that and had it parked with a page offering to sell the domain. i thought that was pretty smart of them, getting people used to having their own domain and then forcing them to buy it from them!