LACNIC (Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre;, ) is the regional Internet registry for the Latin American and Caribbean regions. LACNIC provides number resource allocation and registration services that support the global operation of the Internet. It is a not-for-profit, membership-based organisation whose members include Internet Service Providers, and similar organisations.

Functions

LACNIC's main functions are:

Formation

Since 1993, academic organizations in Latin America like ENRED – Foro de Redes de América Latina y el Caribe, discussed the need of a register for Latin America, independent from the influence of the United States. In 1998 during an ENRED meeting in Panama including NIC-MX, this theme was discussed and they learned that another group formed by commercial organizations like CABASE (Cámara Argentina de Base de Datos y Servicio en Línea) and ECOM-LAC (Latin America and Caribbean Federation for Internet and Electronic Commerce), were also discussing the idea of a Latin American registry. On January 30, 1998, Ira Magaziner, then the senior adviser to President Clinton for policy development, released a discussion paper, known as the "green paper" after the DNS root authority incident. A revised version known as the "white paper" was released on June 5. This paper proposed a new organization to handle internet resources (that later became ICANN). The International Forum for the White Paper organized four meetings, the final one in Buenos Aires was attended by South American communication organizations. Those organizations joined by ECOM-LAC, argued that Latin American IPs addresses could be handled by a local entity and the agreement for creation of LACNIC was signed in Santiago, Chile, on August 22, 1999, during the second ICANN meeting. An Interim Board was defined with six members: The agreement to form LACNIC was submitted on August 26, 1999, to Esther Dyson, then Chair of ICANN Interim Board, and the business plan was presented to ARIN. Statutes were created and it was decided that LACNIC headquarters would be in Montevideo, with technicians and equipment in São Paulo, at the NIC.br premises.LACNIC was established in 2001, with administrative offices in Montevideo, Uruguay, and technical facilities provided by CGI.br of São Paulo. The criteria for a new regional Internet registry was formally recognized by ICANN during its Shanghai meeting in 2002.

Initiatives

Countries - LACNIC region

Membership

Today, LACNIC has a total of over 8,500 members in the following categories:

The Number Resource Organization

With the other RIRs, LACNIC is a member of the Number Resource Organization (NRO), which exists to protect the unallocated number resource pool, to promote and protect the bottom-up policy development process, and to be the focal point for input into the RIR system.