Jaap Akkerhuis
lorenetworking
Dutch network engineer who helped build Europe's first international internet gateways at CWI in Amsterdam, later steered the .nl registry, and now sits on the body that assigns the world's two-letter country codes.
He began in 1977 at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, in the small team under Teus Hagen that did most of the actual networking as the institute became the hub of European computer networks, and he spent the nights and weekends setting up and debugging the first international gateways, reaching as far as Australia by way of Japan and Korea. One detail says how he worked: before the first official public connection between Europe and America existed, he persuaded Jon Postel to allocate him a range of addresses in advance, so that when the connection came there would be no collisions. Seven years in the United States followed, at Carnegie Mellon, mtXinu and Bell Labs, and then the first independent Dutch ISP in 1995, and from 1999 the .nl registry, where the domain count passed a million and his applied work made signing names cryptographically at scale a practical thing. He is now Vice-Chair of the agency that maintains ISO 3166, the list of two-letter country codes - the codes beneath every national domain, and the ones this site's own statistics page uses to name where readers are. Inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2017, the fourth Dutch member; knighted in April 2026.
Also known as: akkerhuis, sidn, nlnet labs, iso 3166
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame inductee page: after seven years in the United States - the Information Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon, the software company mtXinu, and AT&T Bell Labs - Akkerhuis returned to join NLnet, the first independent ISP in the Netherlands, and later advised the .nl registry; he moved between research institutes, ISPs and registries in Europe and the United States as a connector in the technical community, and holds roles across the IETF, ISOC, ICANN, RIPE and the European ccTLD council; he was made a Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion on 24 April 2026
- NLnet, on the 2017 induction: he began at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, now CWI, which became the centre of European computer networks, in the small team led by Teus Hagen that did most of the networking, later joined by Piet Beertema, Jim McKie and Daniel Karrenberg; he spent nights and weekends setting up and debugging the first international gateways, reaching Australia via Japan and South Korea, and well before the first official public connection outside the USA was made at CWI he personally convinced Jon Postel to allocate him a range of IP addresses to avoid future collisions
- SIDN, on the 2026 knighthood: he was part of the CWI team that realised the first public internet connection between Europe and America, and with Hagen, Beertema, McKie and Karrenberg laid the foundations for Amsterdam as a global internet hub; his applied research at SIDN made it possible to sign internet names cryptographically at scale; he is Vice-Chair of the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency, responsible for the assignment of country codes such as NL and DE, which also underlie domains such as .nl
- CWI, on the induction: his career began in 1977 at the Mathematical Centre; he joined NLnet in 1995 and worked at SIDN from 1999 to 2004, during which the number of .nl domains passed one million; the induction made him the fourth Dutch member of a Hall of Fame then numbering 103