Talk:Bill Woodcock

Doing a major cleanup

This is a page about a clearly notable individual but it's not in great shape. I'm going to do a major cleanup today and tomorrow. Pmetzger (talk) 13:54, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Notes for anyone willing to undertake a clean-up

Hi. A lot of the text here is drawn from very, very old biographical articles, and doesn't have much to do with anything I've done in the past decade or more. For reference, here's a current bio statement that I use for conference programs:

Bill Woodcock is the executive director of Packet Clearing House, the international non-governmental organization that builds and supports critical Internet infrastructure, including Internet exchange points and the core of the domain name system. Since entering the Internet industry in 1985, Bill has helped establish more than three hundred Internet exchange points. In 1989, Bill developed the anycast routing technique that now protects the domain name system. In 1998 he was one of the principal drivers of California 17538.4, the world’s first anti-spam legislation. Bill was principal author of the Multicast DNS and Operator Requirements of Infrastructure Management Methods IETF drafts. In 2002 he co-founded INOC-DBA, the security-coordination hotline system that interconnects the network operations centers of more than three thousand ISPs around the world. And in 2007, Bill was one of the two international liaisons deployed by NSP-Sec to the Estonian CERT during the Russian cyber-attack. In 2011, Bill authored the first survey of Internet interconnection agreements, as input to the OECD’s analysis of the Internet economy. Bill serves on the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, and the Commission on Caribbean Communications Resilience. He's on the board of directors of the M3AA Foundation, and was on the board of the American Registry for Internet Numbers for fifteen years. Now, Bill’s work focuses principally on the security and economic stability of critical Internet infrastructure.

That's a reasonable summary of what most people want to know about me most of the time.

Diving a bit deeper, one of the most influential pieces of work I've done is the two surveys of Internet connection agreements, the first at Sam Paltridge's urging, to support the 2011 OECD telecom regulatory guidelines, and the second in 2016. I plan to continue every five years, to build good time-series data. And that builds upon the canonical directory of Internet exchange points that I've been maintaining (now with the help of my staff) since 1993.

A big deal earlier in my career was the INOC-DBA hotline phone system which, at its peak, interconnected the network operations centers of some 3,800 network operators and CERTs. It was important as the first major cybersecurity operations coordination mechanism, but it was equally important in establishing that end-to-end VoIP was feasible. We built it to serve both the coordination function, but also as a demonstration-proof that H.323 tunnels weren't the only possible way of routing voice over the Internet at production quality. Carriers essentially universally believed that SIP was a pipe dream, and couldn't be implemented as a commercial service. Some of us believed otherwise, and this was a way to get all the carriers comfortable with it "in private" first, so that they could all then subsequently come to the realization that, hey, they could be selling this to customers, too. INOC-DBA was largely the idea of Sean Donelan, who went on to build Einstein. John Todd (now of Quad9) also did a huge portion of the implementation work.

Quad9 is another significant chunk of my career. Like INOC-DBA, it's largely a demonstration-proof, this time that global-scale recursive DNS can be provided without collecting and monetizing personal information. That is, in a fully-GDPR-compliant manner.

What most people know me for is driving the adoption of anycast in the late 1980s, a technology that underlies much of the subsequent work I've done. I don't purport to "have invented it" because it's a relatively simple technique, and there were presumably other people figuring it out in the same era. I did anycast the first root nameserver (I-root) in 2001, after overcoming a lot of arguments from graybeards who were sure it wouldn't work, and have operated the largest anycast network in the world ever since.

The other big theme in my work has been the building and support of Internet Exchange Points. I've participated in most of the IXPs the world has seen, currently have equipment at more than 200 of them, have participated in the setup or governance or support of more than anyone else has. Heck, I've undoubtedly actually set foot in more than anyone else has. I wrote lot of the early and formative economic theory about the work that IXPs do.

Here are some random links that may be useful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoEKclWpRJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNF6TE75mzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxZu7SpoLCE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od_dBpEHMuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOOoJl_A-8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT19sxF7z2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmqKw3RYYUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-bic4nFvT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2FyZZbvTKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlhu8_Aa7J8

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=-sMWm49Eal0J&hl=en

https://cyberstability.org/commissioners/bill-woodcock/

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/20/brazil-internet-dilmarousseffnsa.html

https://resources.sei.cmu.edu/library/asset-view.cfm?assetid=49866

Bill Woodcock (talk) 00:59, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Untitled

Hmm. As I recall, neither of us were "prinicpal" lobbyists -- we only spoke in front of the California Senate Commerce Committee -- and, in fact, we were both against that bill because it was opt-out. (Bill was there on behalf of the Packet Clearing House, and I was there for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.) Jdfalk (talk) 21:05, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Attempted take-over

I changed a non-NPOV description of the WCIT as an "attempted take-over of the institutions of Internet governance". Whilst Bill thinks that, others would call it wild hyperbole.. Jeremy Malcolm (talk) 03:32, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Deletion?

Articles about Bill Woodcock and the impact of his projects in The New York Times, Wired, and Forbes without a doubt constitute notability, so I’m surprised deletion is under consideration, especially as Wikipedia.ORG would not have been up and running reliably 2010 - 2020 without the work of Packet Clearing House, and the DNS infrastructure it provided to Afilias.

jubois (25 May 2021)