Beginning on December 1st, 2010, LACNIC's registration service shall cease to reserve contiguous IPv4 address space.

As an operational procedure for certain allocations to large ISPs, LACNIC reserves contiguous blocks at its own discretion. The aim of these reservations is to decrease block fragmentation in case of future allocations to the same provider as part of the "routability" objective referred to in RFC2050, Regional Internet Registry IP Address Allocation Guidelines.

The decision to cease reserving IPv4 address space is based on the fact that the principles of "routability" and "conservation" are mutually in conflict and, due to the imminent exhaustion of the central pool of IPv4 addresses and their subsequent scarcity, the principle of "conservation" takes precedence over that of "routability".

Reservations made prior to December 1st, 2010, will be maintained until their expiry date with no option to extend them.