William Manning is a contributing scientist on CenterGate's UltraDNS, and serves on the research staff at USC's Information Sciences Institute. He is currently involved in projects understanding the operational impact of new features in the DNS, IPv6, DNSSEC, and IDN. His primary technical interests have been in network operations and naming systems.

Previously at Texas Instruments, Bill was responsible for the deployment of IP networking first in the Semiconductor division and then throughout the corporation. He then joined Rice University to become the lead engineer for the NSFnet's SESQUINET regional network. Based on his responsibility and performance handling the migration of SESQUINET and MIDnet from the NSFnet to commercial networks, he was asked to assume a role in the NSFs Routing Arbitor project at ISI.

He is active in the IETF, and has been active in the DNS and Routing working groups as an active participant, working group chair and code developer. Bill was responsible for specifying the method for adding NSAP support to the DNS, and then developed and implemented a plan to expand the Internet root server system to add four new nodes, J, K, L, and M.

He continues to work on enhancing DNS code to track the growth of IP networks. He is also currently working with the IPv6 developers and implementers by managing the IP6.INT and IP6.ARPA domains, which are the functional equivalent of the in-addr.arpa zone.

Bill is on the program committees for the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG), the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT). He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of ARIN (American Registery for Internet Numbers)