Summary

  • A LACNIC 46 presentation marks 9.39% of legacy organizations as contacted, yet their group accounts for 24.67% of legacy IPv4 resources. The slide gives no raw counts or dated measurement window.
  • Holders have until 16 December to contact the registry. After a right-of-use review, they can choose free WHOIS contact maintenance, paid management services from 2027, or membership; those choices have different consequences for legacy status.

LACNIC’s outreach has found some big drawers of old IPv4 paper. In its LACNIC 46 presentation, the registry says 9.39% of legacy organizations have been contacted. Those organizations account for 24.67% of the legacy IPv4 resources in its second chart. One contact column looks small; the address column looks much larger. The deadline on the same slides is 16 December.

The two percentages use different units. One counts organizations; the other groups IPv4 resources by whether their holders have been contacted. Neither is a response rate. Neither says a claim has passed review. The slide does not provide the number of organizations or addresses behind either percentage, the snapshot’s exact date, or how contacts were selected. Those counts and dates would show whether the gap narrowed as the campaign moved beyond its early reach.

The unevenness matters because the institutional call is addressed to organizations, not to an aggregate number of IP addresses. It began on 16 June and gives holders or users of legacy IPv4 six months to identify themselves. A handful of large blocks can lift the resource-coverage figure while most separate counterparties still have to find the registry, assemble documents and make contact. The presentation puts 90.6% of organizations and 75.3% of legacy IPv4 resources in the uncontacted groups. The rounded pairs on its slide are not a complete case ledger.

LACNIC’s process has four moves: contact Registration Services, identify the IPv4 resources, provide the documents requested, and await case analysis. A message starts a case; it does not certify title. The public call says LACNIC will cease registration services for an organization that misses the deadline or cannot justify its right of use after review. It does not publish a count of completed reviews or service cessations in this presentation. A service decision and a claim of ownership are different acts.

Once a claim is justified, the menu has three prices and two legal shapes. The presentation offers a WHOIS contact-information path without a fee; a WHOIS-plus-management path with an annual fee; and full LACNIC membership with an annual fee. The first two preserve legacy IPv4 status. Membership removes that status. Management services include RPKI, reverse DNS, Geofeeds, IRR and sub-assignment functions. Calling all three routes “registration” would hide the service and status choices a holder is being asked to make.

The fee page is more precise than the broad campaign language. The paid management route starts charging in 2027: USD 633 annually for an organization with less than a /22 of legacy IPv4 in total, USD 1,055 for a /22 or more, subject to an annual inflation adjustment. The free WHOIS-only route does not inherit that charge. Nor does the paid management route turn legacy addresses into ordinary member resources. A holder needs to know which door the registry has actually opened before treating a bill as the cost of remaining on record.

There is a second institutional clock. LACNIC’s policy register says the older legacy-management proposal failed to reach consensus, while a new resource-recovery proposal is still under discussion. The Board-approved contact campaign has its own stated registration-service consequence; neither policy status makes a recovery decision on any particular block. This article’s new fact is the contact split, which tells us how far that campaign has reached across two different populations.

The next useful publication is a dated table: total holders, total legacy addresses, contacted and responding holders, cases reviewed, service decisions and the chosen service path. Until then, LACNIC’s 24.67% resource figure is a measure of the addresses tied to contacted holders. The more politically awkward 9.39% is the measure of how many separate organizations have heard from the registry.

Sources: LACNIC’s LACNIC 46 legacy-resource presentation, institutional call and policy register.