Summary

  • LACNIC's Board gave legacy IPv4 holders until 16 December 2026 to contact the registry and justify their right to use their resources. Its published consequence for failing that process is the end of registration services.
  • Proposal LAC-2026-5 would add section 7.6 to the policy manual. It would let the Board initiate recovery when a legacy holder fails formalization, use, routing, reverse-resolution, WHOIS or abuse-contact conditions. Recovery is a different act with a different burden.

The Board's June call is plain about the first step. A holder identifies itself to LACNIC; registration staff request documents and analyze the case. If the organization does not make contact by 16 December, or cannot justify its right to use the IPv4 resources after review, LACNIC says it will cease providing registration services. The call says nothing about the block automatically returning to a pool that day.

Jordi Palet Martinez's LAC-2026-5 takes the next step. Its proposed section 7.6 says legacy resources may continue receiving LACNIC services if their holders joined that formalization process and justified use, the resources are announced and utilized, reverse-resolution records are maintained, allocation and assignment data are current in WHOIS, and abuse-c is up to date. If those conditions fail, the Board may initiate recovery procedures. That final verb is discretionary, but the available remedy is much larger than closing a service window.

The difference matters because the conditions mix evidence of control with signs of operation. A stale abuse contact can make incident response miserable. A missing reverse record can complicate administration. Neither entry alone establishes that the historical holder surrendered the original allocation. Routing visibility is also a snapshot of network practice, not a deed. The draft must explain which failure proves an unjustified resource and which failure calls for a record correction. Otherwise a maintenance checklist becomes an asset tribunal.

LACNIC already publishes a recovery procedure. Its existing public explanation begins with resources assigned or allocated by LACNIC under a Registration Services Agreement. It lists grounds including nonvisibility in global routing, policy or agreement breaches, disappearance of an organization and unauthorized transfers. It describes attempted contact, a three-month public listing for correction, removal of relevant NS records after two months and recovery after three if the problem persists.

That procedure supplies operational context; it does not, by itself, answer how a pre-registry legacy holder without the same agreement enters the new proposed section.

The proposer treats uncontactable holders, unused resources and possible misappropriation as reasons to act. Those are distinct cases. A vanished organization, a block temporarily absent from a routing table and a falsified claim of ownership cannot be adjudicated by one blank field. The published proposal offers no separate evidence standard for each case. It also refers to resources generally, while the Board's June cessation notice expressly speaks of IPv4 resources. The expansion deserves an explicit scope and a recorded decision path.

LAC-2026-5 version 1 remains in discussion until 11 November, with its first consensus assessment scheduled next. The Board's formalization deadline is 16 December. The sequence gives the policy community a narrow window to specify what happens between a stopped service and a recovered resource. The missing document is a case rule stating what evidence establishes unjustified use for a legacy holder, who decides it and how the holder can challenge that finding.

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