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The announcement in Feb 2011 was that IANA had allocated the last IPv4 address blocks from the planned allocations. IANA (ICANN) and the RIRs then worked to recover some blocks of unused IPv4 addresses. These became the "recovered IPv4 pool" and the agreement was that allocations from this pool would begin once one of the RIRs reached the last /9 of their available IPv4 address space.

LACNIC hit that mark and triggered ICANN's policy to start allocating out of this recovered address space pool. The NRO has an announcement up about this, too:

http://www.nro.net/news/iana-allocates-recovered-ipv4-addres...

Basically, after this recovered pool of IPv4 addresses is allocated by IANA, there aren't any more IPv4 addresses to give out.

Here is the registry: http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-recovered-address-space

It is space that has been surrendered to IANA for re-allocation.

AFAIK some people gave space back to IANA and now even that is running out.