Internet pioneer Jaap Akkerhuis Knighted for Exceptional Contribution to Society

Jaap Akkerhuis was awarded Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion on April 24, 2026 for his pioneering work in the early days of the internet. The decoration is the highest civilian order of chivalry in the Netherlands, conferred on persons who have rendered outstanding service to society. Jaap has been instrumental in the development of the internet in the Netherlands and Europe since the early 1980s. He made invaluable contributions to NLnet in its days as the first Dutch Internet Service Provider.

Jaap is a protocol designer and expert on the internet's naming system. He currently serves as a senior research engineer at NLnet Labs, and vice-chair of the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency responsible for the allocation of country codes. He was inducted in the Internet Hall of Fame in 2017.

Laying the foundations for the Dutch internet

Jaap started his career in 1979 at the Computer Laboratory of the Mathematical Centre (currently named CWI) which in the years that followed established itself as the centre of European computer networks and helped lay the foundation for Amsterdam as a global internet hub. In addition to his regular scientific tasks, Jaap spent countless nights and weekends in setting up and debugging connections and first international gateways - for countries all the way up to Australia, via Japan and South Korea. Well before the first official public connection to the internet outside of the USA was made at CWI, he personally convinced Jon Postel to allocate him a range of IP-addresses to avoid future collisions.

Global connector

Jaap went back and forth between scientific institutes, research labs, ISPs and registries in Europe and across the USA - thereby playing a key role as a global connector in the technical community. Jaap is appreciated by many for his no-nonsense approach and lack of ego. He made a flood of technical and organisational contributions over the years. For 23 years, Jaap advised on threats to the stability and security of the Internet as a member of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee. He co-founded and chaired RIPE's DNS working group, facilitating operational coordination between operators of critical internet infrastructure.

Applied research and standardisation for the Internet

His applied research while employed at SIDN made it possible to cryptographically sign internet names at scale – a milestone in the security of the global Domain Name System. In the IETF, the international standardisation organisation for the Internet, Jaap co-chaired the standardisation of automation technology for the registration of internet domain names. The resulting standard Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) is in use around the world to this day.

We congratulate Jaap with the well-deserved honour bestowed on him with this Knighthood and thank him for his tremendous contributions to NLnet, the internet and society at large.

Read more about Jaap Akkerhuis and all the work he has done on the People page of our website.