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French-Costa Rican Guy de Téramond Peralta was one of the 2023 inductees into the Internet Hall of Fame. De Téramond is the former Costa Rican Minister of Science and Technology, a post in which he led the Advanced Internet Network project to bring broadband connectivity to the entire country.

A high-energy physicist, Dr. Guy de Téramond Peralta played an essential role in connecting many Central American and Caribbean countries to the Internet, leading both negotiations and technical aspects of multiple connection projects. De Téramond began facilitating these connections in the early 1990s while serving as a professor of physics at the University of Costa Rica (UCR), where he initiated a project to establish a BITNET connection between the UCR and Florida Atlantic University. BITNET was a cooperative system of computer networks originally based at universities in the United States.

As the founder of Costa Rica Network Information Center, de Téramond was instrumental in 1992 in obtaining the top level domain of .CR for Costa Rica from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the organization which manages the registries that govern Internet identifiers. This paved the way for further Internet connectivity in 1993, when de Téramond, now the leader of Costa Rica National Research Network (CRNet), with his team of engineers connected a small network of UCR computers to the fledgling Internet.

Having brought Costa Rica online, de Téramond worked with the Organization of American States and the Hemisphere-Wide Inter-University Scientific and Technological Information Network (known by its Spanish acronym, RedHUCyT) to then pioneer Internet connections for Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Jamaica, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Belize. These projects required de Téramonds considerable negotiation and diplomacy skills to bring together coalitions across governments, local networking organizations, global Internet governing bodies, and private industry.

De Téramond further served Costa Rica as Minister of Science and Technology in the early 2000s. In this role, he led the Advanced Internet Network (Red de Internet Avanzada) project to bring broadband connectivity to the entire country. In 2014, de Téramond participated in the establishment of the Costa Rica Internet Exchange (CRIX), which provides faster networking by reducing the need for Costa Rican Internet traffic to be routed abroad, and the Internet Consulting Council, the countrys Internet governing body.

The list of honorees for the award given by the Internet Society every two years was released on September 26, in a virtual ceremony available at https://bit.ly/48UwgMw. In addition to Guy de Téramond and other experts, Brazilians Hartmut Glaser and Ivan Moura Campos, who played a key role in the creation of the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br), a governing body created in 1995 to establish guidelines and standards recommendations for the implementation of Internet services in the country, were also nominated. It is the authority that establishes the ".br" registrations of websites, as well as good security practices.

Created in 2012, the Internet Hall of Fame is an ongoing awards program of the Internet Society to recognize a distinguished and select group of leaders and big names who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the global open Internet. For more information about the award and to meet the other honorees, visit http://www.internethalloffame.org/