Summary

  • Hernán Arcidiácono coauthored LAC-2024-4, implemented in April 2025, requiring a public log of assignments, recoveries and returns from LACNIC’s special IPv4 reserve for critical infrastructure.
  • He also coauthored LAC-2025-5. Ratified in March 2026, its final text calls for WHOIS identification and a public start-and-end log for third-party IPv4 sub-assignments; LACNIC still lists it as Ratified.

At an internet exchange, traffic keeps receipts in counters and route tables. Address policy has been less generous with the paper trail. Hernán Arcidiácono, whom LAC-IX names as chair of its policy working group, put his name on two proposals that ask a blunt question: when IPv4 moves, who gets to see the entry?

The first ledger concerns a cupboard with a particular key. LACNIC holds a special IPv4 pool for critical infrastructure, including exchange points. In LAC-2024-4, Arcidiácono, Ricardo Patara and Edwin Salazar Ordoñez asked the registry to publish micro-assignments from that pool, and to record recoveries and returns as well. Their stated worry was that a sham IXP could seek scarce space. A dated list gives the community a place to check what left the cupboard and what came back. LACNIC implemented the rule on 25 April 2025.

The second ledger follows addresses outside that special pool. The final text of LAC-2025-5, coauthored by Arcidiácono with Edmundo Casarez Lopez, Douglas Fischer and Uesley Correa, sets out a way for a holder to sub-assign IPv4 to another organization. The receiving network would need its own ASN and LACNIC-assigned IPv6 space. A block would run from /24 to /22; the recipient would show 25% immediate need and a path to 50% use within a year. The record would tie the block to the recipient ASN in WHOIS and put each start or end event in a public movement log. The holder would remain answerable for the addresses.

The details tell the story of two different doors. The critical-infrastructure reserve is explicitly excluded from the sub-assignment scheme. For that reserve, readers need to see an assignment, recovery or return. For a third-party sub-assignment, they need the recipient ASN, block, date and start-or-end event. LACNIC ratified the second proposal on 24 March 2026; its policy page still shows “Ratified,” at 86%, rather than “Implemented.” The first ledger has an implementation date. The second has a ratified design and a clock still running at the registry.

Arcidiácono’s LACNIC biography traces him through IPLAN, the Buenos Aires IXP and LAC-IX. That is a practical vantage point for this pair of rules. An address block can be perfectly real while the story of its use is foggy. Two well-kept ledgers would give that story a date, a block and a responsible party—three things a network operator can actually investigate.