Summary

  • Tomás Lynch authored both versions of LAC-2023-3. LACNIC implemented the adopted version on 11 July 2024.
  • A proposal left for twelve months in “Did not reach consensus” or “Not ratified” moves to “Abandoned.” LACNIC received the status-change duty formerly left to policy forum chairs.

Internet policy has a peculiar afterlife. A proposal can fail to win consensus, stop moving, and still sit in the system like an empty chair with a name card. Tomás Lynch counted six such proposals when he made his case; some had been stranded since October 2021. His LAC-2023-3 record puts a clock where the name card used to be.

Lynch is hardly a stranger to long meetings. LACNIC's speaker biography describes decades of BGP and network architecture work, policy-forum moderation since 2019, and a declared ambition to retire as a tango singer. A tango can pause for effect. A policy register needs to say when the music has stopped.

The first draft asked chairs to request an “Abandoned” label after ten months without a new version or withdrawal. That still made the chairs judge when to act. Version two changed both the owner and the clock. If a proposal remains in “Did not reach consensus” or “Not ratified” for twelve calendar months, LACNIC moves its latest version to “Abandoned.” The rule removed the chairs' old function of deciding whether to abandon a policy. That old wording had a second problem: it said “policy” where the object was a proposal. An adopted rule in the manual should never be swept into a housekeeping bin meant for unfinished drafts.

The timeline matters as much as the label. A proposal in either stalled state gets a year in which another version can emerge. After that, the public record gains a clear status rather than another ambiguous silence. “Abandoned” is a semi-permanent shelf: an original author or someone else may return with the idea. The shelf has a label, and the next person can see what was left there.

LACNIC's staff made one operational detail plain. The text says the move happens automatically, but staff expected to make the status change manually until the policy system could automate it. The adopted duty is concrete even while a human clerk carries it out. Staff also limited its application to versions submitted after ratification. The board ratified the proposal in July 2024; LACNIC implemented it on 11 July.

Lynch did not give failed ideas a trapdoor. He made the registry say, on a date anyone can count, whether a proposal is still alive in the process. That is a small act of honesty for a system that asks people to read its history before arguing about its future.