Bill Manning has been involved in networking since 1979, when he joined Texas Instruments to build out their global IP network. He then joined Rice University and was part of the team that built and ran SESQUINET. He was instrumental in the migration of MIDNET and SESQUINET from NSFnet regional networks to commercial networks. He served on the COREN and CALREN-2 technical committees.

He joined ISI in the Routing Arbitor project and currently he serves on the research staff at USC's Information Sciences Institute. His primary technical interests have been in operating networks and naming systems.

He is active in the IETF as an individual participant, past working group chair and code developer. He 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. He has been active in operational IPv6 networks since 1997 and runs a native IPv6 DNS testbed and native IPv6 NTP service.

Bill is on the program committees for NANOG and APRICOT, is an ARIN Board of Trustees member. He is also a member of ICANN's Root System Server advisory committee. He speaks frequently at technical conferences and provides independent consulting services through ep.net, llc.