2018 Award Committee Appointed

Jaap Akkerhuis

Jaap Akkerhuis has been instrumental in the development of the Internet in the Netherlands and Europe since the early 1980s.

After a period of seven years in the U.S., where he was active at the Information Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, software company mtXinu, and AT&T Bell Labs, Jaap returned to the Netherlands where he joined the NLnet Labs, the first independent ISP in the Netherlands. Later Jaap worked as a technical advisor for Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland, the registry of the .NL country code top-level domain.

Jaap went back and forth between scientific institutes, research labs, Internet service providers and registries in Europe and across the U.S., playing a key role as a global connector in the technical community.

Throughout his career, Jaap has spent a generous amount of time sharing his knowledge with others and playing key roles in organisations such as the European Unix User Group, Advanced Computing Systems Association (USENIX), the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE) and The Council of European National Top-Level Domain Registries.

Currently, he is a research engineer in the research and development group at NLnet Labs, focusing on IT development.

In 2017 Jaap got inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Eva Frölich

Eva Frölich started her career with the incumbent Swedish telco in 1985. In 1997, she was the first employee of Network Information Centre SE (NIC-SE) and has since then been Internet faithful.

During 1999-2002, Eva was on the board of CENTR, the Council of European National Top-Level Registries.

During 2004-2007, Eva served on the Board of Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registry for the top-level domain (TLD) .org, now also .ngo and .ong. She was the Chair of the Board 2004-2005 and was acting CEO during 2007 while a process of appointing a new CEO took place.

Eva has been active within ICANN and held a board seat at ccNSO until the change of year 2005/2006.

Eva has also been active in the Swedish Association of Registrars – Registrars.se. Registrars.se works for a healthy and serious domain names market, as well as working together with the Swedish Post and Telecom Authority and the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation, to ensure the TLD .se is the best TLD worldwide.

During 2010-2013 Eva took a seat on the Internet Society (ISOC) Board of Trustees and at the annual meeting 2012 she was appointed the first female Chair of the Board of Trustees.

Eva´s day-to-day job, in parallel with her international engagements, is to run a domain name registrar and hosting company in Sweden – Frobbit!

Elise Gerich

Elise Gerich began her career in networking at Merit Network, a consortium of state funded universities in Michigan. She was a member of the team that built and operated the NSFNET T1 and T3 networks. While at Merit she was the Associate Director for National Networking and was a Principle Invesitgator for NSFNET’s T3 Backbone Project and the NSFNET’s Routing Arbiter Project.

In addition, Elise was co-founder of the North American Network Operators’ Group (NANOG), the US National Science Foundation’s representative on the Federal Engineering Planning Group, a member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and served as co-chair of the Internet Planning Group (IEPG).

After Merit, Elise worked as Director of Operations for the @Home Network which built and operated the first national backbone for delivery of Internet Services by North American cable operators. Following @Home, she was Director of Software Product Management at Juniper Networks for nine years before joining ICANN. Elise served as ICANN’s Vice President of IANA for seven years and was named the first President of Public Technical Identifiers (PTI) ICANN’s affiliate when ICANN’s contract with the US government expired. She served both as President of PTI and Vice President of IANA until her retirement in January 2018.

Daniel Karrenberg

Daniel Karrenberg is one of the pioneers of the Internet in Europe. In the 1980s, he helped build EUnet, the first pan-European Internet Service Provider (ISP). In 1989, Daniel was one of the founders of RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens), the key collaborative forum in Europe for Internet coordination. In the 1990s, Daniel led the formation of the world’s first Regional Internet Registry, the RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), serving Europe, the Middle East as well as, initially, parts of Africa and Central Asia.

Since they year 2000 Daniel is the Chief Scientist at the RIPE NCC. In this role he has led a significant number of activities, including the RIPE Routing Information Service (RIS), the global measurement platform RIPE Atlas, DNS Monitoring Service (DNSMON), RIPEstat and, together with NLnet Labs, the Name Server Daemon (NSD). His current interests remain the Internet in general as well as trust, identity, quantum networking and measurements on the Internet in particular.

In 2001, Daniel was awarded the prestigious Jon Postel Internet Service Award “for two decades of extraordinary dedication to the development of networking in Europe and around the world”; he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

Daniel lives in Roermond, the Netherlands.