Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre - History

History

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. In 1998 during an ENRED meeting in Panamá 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 e-COMLAC (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). Following this release, a number of groups organized conferences to discuss its proposal and make suggestions, among them, the IFWP or International Forum for the White Paper.

IFWP organized four meetings, the last one in Buenos Aires, where several South Americans distinguished persons and organizations participated and got to know each other. Among them Oscar Messano, Anthony Harris and Edmundo Valiente from CABASE, Fabio Marinho, member of the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) and President of ASSESPRO – Associação Brasileira de Empresas de Software Serviços de Informática e Internet, Raimundo Beca - AHCIET – Association Hispanoamericana de Centros de Investigacion y Empresas de Telecomunicaciones, Brasil, NIC México - Oscar Robles and German Valdez, y Julian Dunayevich, Raul Echeverria, ENRED.

Those organizations joined by eCOMLAC – Federación Latino Americana y Caribeña para Internet y el Comercio Electrônico, argumented that Latin American IPs addresses could be handled by a local entity and reached an agreement for its creation. Others persons participated in these early discussion, among the Eliezer Cadenas (ENRED), Fidel Vienegas (AHCIET), Raphael Mandarino (CGI.br).

Finally, the agreement for creation of LACNIC (Latin American and Caribbean IP Address Regional Registry), was signed in Santiago de Chile on August 22, 1999 during the second ICANN meeting.

An Interim Board was defined with six members:

• AHCIET – Raimundo Beca;
• CABASE – Jorge Plano, later substituted by Oscar Messano;
• CGI.br – José Luis Ribeiro;
• ENRED – Julian Dunayerich; later substituted by Raul Echeverria;
• NIC.mx – German Valdez;
• ECOMLAC – Fabio Marinho;

Next step, this LACNIC Interim Board submitted on August 26, 1999, this agreement to Esther Dyson, then Chair of ICANN Interim Board for ICANN approval.

A Business Plan of this new organization was developed and presented to ARIN, the organization responsible for this region at that moment. Statutes were created and it was decided that LACNIC headquarters would be in Montevideo, with technical people and equipment in São Paulo, in NIC.br premises.

LACNIC, being in full conformance with the criteria for a new Regional Internet Registry as set forth by the Internet Registry community and ICANN, was formally recognized by ICANN during its Shanghai meeting in 2002.

LACNIC was established in 2001, with administrative offices in Montevideo, Uruguay and technical facilities provided by CGI.br of São Paulo.