The Internet Architecture Board has a new leader: Olaf Kolkman, a DNS expert from the Netherlands.

The IAB provides overall architectural direction and oversight to the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet’s premier standards body. The IAB also serves as the technology advisory group for the Internet Society, a professional organization that provides advice on Internet policy.

Kolkman will take over the reins at the IAB at a meeting in Prague on Thursday evening.

Kolkman works for NLnet Labs, an Amsterdam start-up working on DNS Security and IPv6, an upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol.

The IAB is a 13-member group of leading Internet engineers that debates big-picture traffic and technology trends. Topics the IAB has tackled in the past include how best to scale the Internet’s routing infrastructure to support more users and how to develop security mechanisms that are easy to use and can be incrementally deployed.

Kolkman replaces Leslie Daigle, an expert in search engines, directory and Web services, who has served as IAB chair since 2002.

Kolkman is chair of the DNS Extensions Working Group at the IETF, which is developing advanced DNS protocols. He has been a member of the IAB since 2006.

Kolkman is the eighth chair of the IAB. Previous IAB chairs include such luminaries as: Vint Cerf, one of the inventors of TCP/IP; John Klensin, who helped design the Internet’s original file-transfer and e-mail systems in the late 1960s; and David Clark, an MIT scientists who was a key early contributor to many Internet protocols.

The IAB has its roots in a committee formed in 1979 by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that was called the Internet Configuration Control Board. The committee’s name was changed to the Internet Advisory Board in 1984 and the Internet Activities Board in 1986. It became the Internet Architecture Board in 1992.