Summary

  • LAC-2015-4 explicitly replaced a six-month publication period in Section 7.1 with three months and is recorded as implemented on 14 December 2015.
  • LACNIC's current IP & ASN Recovery page and Policy Manual v2.21 describe a three-month public-list period, deletion of NS records after two months, and recovery after three months if the situation remains unrectified.
  • A separate public Resource recovery procedure page still gives six months. Its payment section also says resources will be published for six months, then calls the cure interval this 3 month period.
  • The evidence proves inconsistent public instructions, not inconsistent enforcement. A visible version-and-clock card or a historical-page banner would restore the handoff without erasing the old record.

On 14 December 2015, LACNIC implemented one of the least ambiguous policy edits a registry can make. LAC-2015-4, titled Resource Recovery Timeline, identified a sentence in Section 7.1 that gave an organisation six months after publication to rectify its position. It replaced six with three.

The rationale was equally direct. Six months had proved too long, the proposal said, because LACNIC and the national Internet registries already tried to contact organisations before starting recovery. The interval before publication and the six-month cure period together allowed more time than the authors thought necessary. The policy system now marks the proposal Implemented and supplies the date.

That is the kind of public lineage that should make a later procedure easy to read. A reader ought to be able to move from the old rule, through the change, to the current clock without interpreting which page looks newer. LACNIC's public surface does not quite complete that journey.

Its current IP & ASN Recovery page says that resources set for recovery are published for three months. It lays out the sequence: LACNIC has evidence of a listed breach, attempts contact and rectification, publishes the resources if the issue cannot be resolved, deletes NS records after two months, and recovers the resources after three months if the situation remains unrectified.

The current Policy Manual v2.21 says the same thing with a little more precision. Section 7.1 begins the enumerated process once evidence has been detected and confirmed. Publication lasts for a maximum of three months. Two months after publication, LACNIC may delete the NS records pointing to authoritative nameservers; after three, it may recover the resources and remove the holder records if the matter has not been rectified.

But a different page, Resource recovery procedure, still preserves the earlier six-month language. For resources not visible in the global routing table, it says the procedure is triggered after six months of non-visibility. After contact, and after recognising that a resource may be in use without being globally visible, it says an unrectified resource will be placed on a public list for six months before recovery.

That page is not merely a historical curiosity behind an archive label. It remains a normal public LACNIC page, carries a procedural title and tells the reader that policy LAC-2009-06 mandated the process. Nothing prominent on the page tells a holder that the public-list interval was changed by LAC-2015-4, that the current operational explanation is elsewhere, or that the six-month sentence is historical.

Three clocks that should not be merged

The discrepancy is easy to overstate if every mention of a month is treated as one countdown. LACNIC's sources contain several clocks with different starting events.

Policy Manual Section 1.6 gives resource-type announcement deadlines: three months for IPv4, twelve months for IPv6 and six months for an ASN, unless the need not to announce is justified. Those deadlines begin from allocation or assignment and concern announcement. They are not a recovery notice.

The old procedure page adds a six-month routing-observation threshold. It says LACNIC records when a resource was last seen and triggers the procedure after six months of non-visibility. That may be an operational screening rule distinct from the policy publication period. The available sources do not establish whether LACNIC still uses it, replaced it, or treats it as one signal among others.

Section 7.1 then defines a post-publication clock. It starts only after evidence has been detected and confirmed, contact has been attempted and rectification has failed. That is the clock LAC-2015-4 explicitly shortened. The current maximum is three months, with an NS step at month two.

Stage Public source Clock or condition What may be concluded
Announcement Policy Manual 1.6 IPv4 3 months; IPv6 12; ASN 6; justified exception A resource-type obligation, not a recovery deadline
Observation Older procedure page Not seen in the global table for 6 months A stated trigger on that page, not proof of non-use
Evidence Current Section 7.1 Detected and confirmed The formal sequence does not begin from a bare routing observation alone
Contact Current operational page and manual Attempt rectification No fixed duration stated in the checked text
Public list Current page and Section 7.1 Maximum 3 months The clock changed by LAC-2015-4
NS records Current page and Section 7.1 2 months after publication A reversible operational step after renewed contact
Recovery Current page and Section 7.1 3 months after publication if unrectified Conditional endpoint, subject to the wider agreement and exceptions

This separation matters because the old page itself recognises the central evidentiary limit. A delegation can be used without appearing in the global routing table. If the organisation justifies that condition, the page says the recovery process ends. Non-visibility is therefore an observation, not a verdict.

It would be wrong to add six months of observation to six months of publication and declare a proven twelve-month procedure. It would be equally wrong to read Section 1.6's six-month ASN announcement deadline as the same six months. The reader needs the start event beside every duration.

The payment paragraph contains its own warning

The older page becomes harder to interpret in its contract-breach section. It lists invoice and surcharge stages, then says resources assigned to organisations whose invoices are more than 35 days overdue will be published for six months before recovery. The next bullet says organisations that settle their accounts during this 3 month period will be removed from the list.

There is no responsible way to turn those two sentences into one current instruction. The three months might have been inserted when another page was revised, while the six-month line survived. It might refer to an earlier payment stage rather than the public list. It might simply be an editorial mistake. The checked sources do not answer which explanation is right.

What they do show is enough: a resource holder can read one official paragraph and encounter two cure periods. That is precisely the sort of uncertainty a procedure page is supposed to remove.

No conclusion about an actual invoice follows. The public operational page currently lists non-payment among possible grounds and directs holders to billing or hostmaster contacts. It also gives the general three-month recovery sequence. The article has not inspected any holder's account, notice, contract or recovery decision.

The manual has authority, but the page still has effects

The web version of Section 7 tells readers that the PDF is authoritative if the web rendering conflicts with the PDF. It also says the Spanish original prevails over translations in case of discrepancy. Those warnings help identify the formal source, but they do not neutralise every other page on the site.

Most readers do not begin a time-sensitive problem by resolving a hierarchy of instruments. They search for resource recovery, open a page with that title, and read the steps. A resource holder may be a university, a small provider, a public agency or the successor to an organisation whose contact records are already difficult. Asking that reader to discover a 2015 proposal and reconcile it with a current PDF is not a harmless test of policy literacy.

The operational consequence is sequencing. A holder who believes it has six months may delay escalation, legal review, renumbering analysis or contact with an NIR. An upstream or adviser may repeat the old duration. A support team then has to explain privately why another LACNIC page controls.

That mechanism is credible even though no actual loss has been proved. Public text can increase the cost of reaching the right answer without ever changing the answer that staff applies.

A small handoff is enough

The old page does not need to disappear. It is useful evidence of how LAC-2009-06 became an operational procedure, and the old six-month rule belongs in policy history. The repair is to stop presenting history as an unqualified current instruction.

A compact card at the top of the page could state:

  • whether the page is current, historical or superseded;
  • the controlling Policy Manual version and section;
  • LAC-2015-4, its implementation date and the six-to-three change;
  • which clock is an observation threshold and which starts at public listing;
  • the current NS and recovery milestones;
  • any applicable Board or NIR exception; and
  • the current contact and operational-page link.

If the six-month routing-observation threshold remains in use, the card can say so. Preserving it would not conflict with a three-month public-list period, provided the two start events and authorities are distinct. If it is no longer current, the page can be marked historical and linked to the live procedure.

This is a page-maintenance problem before it is a systems problem. A visible status, a source link and a correction date would do most of the work.

Policy history should travel with policy effect

LACNIC's later policy history makes the omission more consequential. LAC-2019-9, implemented in 2021, changed the title from resource recovery to resource revocation and return, consolidated grounds, added the detected and confirmed formulation and retained the three-month sequence. Current Section 7 also contains an exception for essential strategic infrastructure and exceptional conditions such as natural disasters or political instability, with a Board extension after staff assessment.

Its footnote says implementation is phased and that staff identifies priorities, evaluates each phase before proceeding and reports results to the Board. None of this proves which phase is active or how a live case is handled. It does show that the current framework is more qualified than a simple six-month stopwatch.

An accurate public procedure should carry those distinctions far enough for a reader to know where the discretion sits. Evidence confirmation belongs before the enumerated process. Rectification belongs before publication. NS deletion is not the same as final recovery. The Board exception is not an ordinary extension. An NIR path may have its own operating page.

When these stages are compressed into one old narrative, the document does not merely have the wrong number. It gives the wrong shape to the decision.

Sources