I'm following up from Norbert's message and Rafik's question. Good question indeed Rafik, and to be frank I don't think I've an easy answer. I'm not quite sure that the argument about the cost for running ccTLD in developing countries isn't so high is entirely accurate. High relative or compared to what ? Perhaps some of our friends at the ccNSO can provide some insight. I'd expect that more developed countries with a higher GDP and better communication infrastructure will have a more costly operation than others, on the other hand there may be some very popular ccTLDs like .tv that may have a high operating cost but also a good revenue stream from their operations with a GDP that is about 1/3 of ICANN's yearly budget. In some countries, like Argentina, where we registered the ccTLD in 1987 but got our actual first real connection to the Internet in 1990, all the associated costs were absorbed by a special project managed through UNDP but funded by the government with the goal to modernize their ITC infrastructure (actually it didn't exist, everything was Telex and mostly paper). Since then the ccTLD has been operated by the same entity (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and still the operational costs -which I'd probably guess are totally unknown- are covered 100% by the government, domain registrations are still free in .AR. Other places, such as Brazil, and I believe Carlos can provide much more info than me, implemented a pioneering model when they established the Internet Steering Committee and among other Internet related activities the .BR ccTLD registry started to operate if my memory does not fail around 1995 and later started charging for domain registrations, which created a very healthy revenue stream that has been always reinvested to improve services and governance. I'd probably guess that it does not cost much to operate .US. Providing good connectivity, availability and reliability, with servers located in the country and outside the country is not cheap for a developing country, perhaps the assumption that the cost could be lower is related to labor costs. About the $185K I've no clue where that number came from, but I believe it's an estimate based on the number of resources that may take to complete the string evaluation. Sometime ago I was trying to see if there was any financial study related to the overall cost of the gTLD program since its inception, I've been browsing some of the financial statements but the information is not clear and incomplete. So, do we know if ICANN ever looked at the overall cost of the gTLD program ? Regards Jorge