Patrik Fältström

If you’ve ever sent an email attachment from a Mac, you’ve benefited from Patrik Fältström’s work. If you’re Swedish, he’s the one who made it possible for you to use ä, ö, and å in your browser’s address bar, in your email address, or for your website’s URL. His is the kind of foundational work of solving technical problems and setting standards without which the Internet would not have been able to scale across geography, devices, and languages to its 5+ billion users.

It all started with a realization. “Being able to digitalize stuff and turn it into ones and zeros and, with the help of the Internet, then be able to move those ones and zeros, then restore them again. That is something that surprised me,” said Fältström. “I understood it would change society.” That was 1986, when only researchers and certain government entities had Internet access, and electronic files, let alone sending them, had yet to become a mundane part of information sharing.

As a mathematician, seeing patterns in characters and symbols comes naturally to him. Which is one of the reasons there isn’t too much about the technical evolution of the Internet that has surprised him over the years. But the one thing that still pleasantly surprises him is just how effective his work on Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) has been at masking those underlying patterns. That, when you type https://fältström.se/ into a browser window, you don’t see that the computer translates it into https://xn--fltstrm-5wa1o/ — that is all hidden.

“The Internet is a group effort,” Fältström says. This is evident in the technical contributions he’s best known for. But even more so, it has shown up in solving for thornier Internet issues, like how to ensure that decisions about the Internet are made by multiple stakeholders. Literally: he was appointed to the first Multistakeholder Advisory Group in the United Nations in 2006. The Internet is at its best when the best solutions to technical challenges are prioritized over individual national and market objectives.

Fältström is still thinking about the foundational work, still eager to iron out inefficiencies to maximize availability. This includes security related issues, having served as chair of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) for many years, and leading the Swedish team in NATO’s Cyber Defence exercise, Locked Shields, which lead to first place in 2023.

Ultimately it still boils down to his decades’ long focus on interoperability. Just like you should be able to send an attachment from one type of computer to another, or use your own language online, he’s concerned that governments are beginning to design electronic IDs that work only in-country or in-region. If he could have his way, the multistakeholder model and technical expertise would shape that process.