Summary

  • Edmundo Cázarez-López authored all four versions of LAC-2016-2, an IPv4 /15 reserve for critical or essential regional Internet infrastructure. LACNIC records its implementation on 1 December 2016.
  • The final text allowed /24-to-/22 allocations, required addresses back when the original need ended and called for revocation if the holder used them for another purpose. The special reserve was to enter use after Phase 3 exhaustion.

Imagine the last shelf in an IPv4 warehouse with a sign reading “for the machinery that keeps the warehouse open.” Edmundo Cázarez-López wrote something like that into LACNIC policy LAC-2016-2. Its /15 contains 131,072 addresses. The pool was meant to survive the general exhaustion phases so that critical or essential Internet infrastructure could still obtain space after the Phase 3 stock ran out. The policy record says it was implemented on 1 December 2016. The text makes the special pool available for use after Phase 3 exhaustion; those are two separate dates in the life of a reserve.

Cázarez-López worked in the business of keeping number resources legible. LACNIC’s named biography describes him as Internet Number Resources Manager at NIC México, a role he had held since 2011 when that page was published. He authored each of the four versions shown in the policy archive. The later versions sharpened who could draw on the pool and on what terms. A request could be submitted at any time, but a single allocation would be no smaller than a /24 and no larger than a /22, with LACNIC or the relevant national registry checking the use.

The special treatment came with a short leash. In the fourth version, addresses had to be returned when the original need ended. Use them for another purpose and the text called for revocation and return. That is a consequential clause for a pool labelled “critical”: someone must decide whether a network still satisfies the original purpose. The archive states the rule; it does not document a particular revocation.

LACNIC dates the start of Phase 3 to 15 February 2017 and exhaustion of its general IPv4 pool to 19 August 2020. The special shelf opened for real. Its original inventory file, last modified on 26 October 2026, lists 93,440 addresses still reserved and 37,632 marked assigned or allocated. The earliest non-reserved row is a /22 assigned on 17 September 2020 to PIT Bolivia, an Internet exchange. By 2025 the community wanted a clearer window into that cabinet: LAC-2024-4 required a public log of its assignments, recoveries and returns, implemented that April. Its authors were other policy participants; the concern they recorded included requests from fake exchange points.

LACNIC had discussed Cázarez-López’s original proposal from February 2016, presented it at LACNIC 25 in May, ratified it in November and implemented it in December. The official 2025 election result then put him on LACNIC’s board for 2026–28. The reserve he designed now holds real allocations and a public inventory. The address count is exact. The hard part is explaining why each user qualifies to keep its share.