Internet Pioneer Behind DNSSEC and Global Domain Standards Receives Dutch Knighthood

Dutch internet pioneer Jaap Akkerhuis was awarded Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion on April 24, 2026, in Diemen by mayor Erik Boog. This is the highest civilian order of chivalry in the Netherlands, given only to people who have rendered outstanding service to society. Akkerhuis has spent decades working on the Domain Name System (DNS), the internet's phone book that translates human-friendly website names into the numerical addresses computers use to find each other. He is a senior research engineer at NLnet Labs, a protocol designer, and vice-chair of the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency, the group that maintains official two-letter country codes such as NL for the Netherlands and UK for the United Kingdom.

Since the 1980s, Akkerhuis has worked mostly behind the scenes. He was part of the team at CWI, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science, that established and operated the first open internet connection between Europe and the United States. That link helped lay the foundation for Amsterdam to become a global internet hub. His early work contributed directly to the spread of the internet in the Netherlands and around the world.

While employed at SIDN, the foundation that runs the .nl country-code domain, Akkerhuis carried out applied research that made it possible to cryptographically sign internet names at scale. This was a milestone in the security of the global DNS because it enabled DNSSEC, a security extension that adds digital signatures to DNS records. DNSSEC lets users and applications verify that a DNS answer really comes from the legitimate owner of a domain and has not been tampered with on the way. In the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the international body where engineers agree on internet standards, Akkerhuis co-chaired the standardisation of automation technology for registering domain names. The resulting standard, known as EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol), is still used by domain registrars worldwide to register, transfer, and update domain names reliably.

Akkerhuis also spent 23 years as a member of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee, where he advised on threats to the stability and security of the internet. ICANN is the organisation that coordinates global domain names and IP addresses. He co-founded and chaired the DNS working group at RIPE, the regional internet registry for Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia. That group helped operators of critical internet infrastructure, such as large DNS servers and internet service providers, coordinate operationally so that the global DNS remains stable. In 2017, Akkerhuis was recognised as a 'global innovator' and inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. At NLnet Labs, colleagues value his no-nonsense approach to internet governance and engineering and congratulate him on his well-deserved knighthood. They note that he would probably want the spotlight shared with the many people who worked alongside him.

The recognition of Akkerhuis matters for everyday internet users, website owners, and businesses because the technologies he helped build are woven into almost every online action. When you type a web address, your device performs a DNS lookup. If that lookup is not secure, an attacker could redirect you to a fake website or intercept your traffic. DNSSEC helps prevent certain kinds of spoofing and tampering. EPP allows domain registrars to manage millions of domain names securely and automatically, reducing human errors and downtime. The stability work at ICANN and RIPE helps keep the global DNS from breaking under load or attack. For a modern layer of protection, using a private, encrypted DNS resolver such as AEU DNS adds encryption to your device's name lookups so that outsiders cannot see or alter them, complementing the DNSSEC foundations that pioneers like Akkerhuis helped establish.