Bill Woodcock (born August 16, 1971 in San Francisco, California, United States) is research director of Packet Clearing House, a non-profit research institute dedicated to understanding and supporting Internet traffic exchange technology, policy, and economics. Bill entered the field of Internet routing research in 1989, while serving as the network architect and operations director for an international multiprotocol service-provision backbone network. In 1993 and 1994, Woodcock was one of the founders of Packet Clearing House, and has served in his current post as Research Director since 1997. In that time, Woodcock has directly participated in the establishment of more than one hundred public Internet exchange points in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. He continues to serve on the boards of, and provide ongoing technical and policy advice to many of these institutions. Woodcock and J.D. Falk's model spam regulation became California law in 1998 and paved the way for other jurisdictions. Woodcock has successfully concluded telecommunications regulatory reform efforts in several African countries.
Woodcock's published work includes many PCH white-papers, the 1993 McGraw-Hill book Networking the Macintosh, the report of the ANF AppleTalk Tunneling Architectures Working Group, which he chaired in 1993 and 1994, many articles in Network World, MacWorld, MacWEEK, Connections, and other networking journals and periodicals. In addition, he was principal author of the Multicast DNS, IP Anycast, and Operator Requirements of Infrastructure Management Methods IETF drafts. In the early nineties, he pioneered IGP and EGP-based topological load balancing techniques using IP Anycast technology. Together with Mark Kosters he proposed at the 1996 Montreal IEPG that the root DNS servers be migrated to IP Anycast, and their work has provided the basis upon which root DNS servers have been deployed since the late 1990s. In addition to protocol development work, Woodcock has developed networking products for Cisco, Agilent, and Farallon. Woodcock has director roles in four companies in the areas of satellite communications, content distribution, and domain name service technology. In 2001 Woodcock co-authored (with Chuck Goolsbee) the infamous "Chuck & Woody's Fiendishly Difficult Mac-Mgrs Trivia Quiz" for the annual gathering of member of the Macintosh Managers mailing list in San Francisco for Macworld Expo. To date over 50% of the questions remain unanswered.
Woodcock has also served on the board of trustees of ARIN since 2002, the board of directors of the Internet Capacity Development Consortium[1] since 2004, the .ORG Public Interest Registry Advisory Board 2005-2007, and the board of the ISP/Consortium in 1998 and 1999. He is a current or former PCH representative to AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, IEPG, ISOC, the ISP/C, LACNIC, NATOA, and RIPE, and he speaks regularly at AfNOG, APIA, APNIC, APRICOT, ARIN, ISOC, RIPE, IEPG, IETF, SANOG and NANOG meetings. He has served on the program committees of NANOG, SANOG, PAM, and APRICOT.
Woodcock was one of the two international liaisons in Estonia during the computer attacks unleashed after the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn incident and assisted in the defense coordinated by Hillar Aarelaid and the CERT-EE.[2][3]