On 13 May 2017 at 08:22, Kan Kaili <kankaili@gmail.com> wrote:

I may not disagree with your arguments. However, regarding calculating the "costs", that is only next to impossible.

And that is at the heart of the issue. Just how much would you refund?

The devil is in the details. The GNSO policy was clearly about cost-recovery. and I would argue that the sunk costs specific to that round are reasonable to be recovered by the fees.

And then we spend more time debating the amount of refund than we spent rolling out the next round...

Also: the POTS analogy doesn't work, since we are not talking costs of physical infrastructure. We can accurately count the person-hours spent in designing the program, especially that which was expended on that round alone.

From the above exmples, I believe you can already see the complexity of calculating the "real cost" of the new gTLD program. Simply said, I do not believe in any claims of the "real cost", becuase it does not exist at all.

I am not sure that I follow the logic that asserting that "the real cost is complex to calculate" leads to conclusion of "the real cost does not exist at all".

- Evan