In the course of working on blockchain & internet technologies over the past year and a half, we’ve managed to assemble a core team of experts who have been key in developing the programmable internet concept. Today, we want to present to you one of the original members of this core team. Meet William B. Norton. His role in the development of Programmable Internet & the evolution of NOIA has been decisive.

Bill is an internet business expert with a wide range of experience — having worked with both large tech companies and startups. He served as Co-Founder of Equinix (the largest data center operator in the world — currently valued at $42B). After his Equinix career, Bill authored “The Internet Peering Playbook: Connecting to the Core of the Internet” along with 19 other publications on internet architecture.

For more about Bill`s achievements, read on. You’ll understand why we’re so thrilled having him on board.

Co-founding Equinix — the largest data-center operator in the world

Bill was one of the original people to lay the foundations of Equinix. He understands the road from startup to IPO, all the way through an economic downturn, and then back to a $42B market cap. Today, Equinix is the world’s largest IBX data center & colocation provider and a market share leader — with 200 data centers in 24 countries on five continents.

From 1998 through 2008, Bill worked directly with the Internet operations community, facilitating interconnections, researching, and documenting the industry’s best current practices. The resulting “peering white papers” and the follow-on DrPeering.net website are the most widely cited sources for information on Internet Peering in the industry.

Describing his time there Bill says:

“I spent 90% of my time on the road, public speaking and working with customers. My efforts resulted in Equinix’s first customer acquisition (a content provider), a collective of strategic customers (cable companies), and the largest network customers (Tier 1 ISPs). And we displaced the incumbent IXPs!”

Mastering the Internet business

Bill started his career in 1988, developing network management software for the Network Operations Center responsible for monitoring the precursor to the commercial Internet, the NSFNET.

During the transition to the commercial Internet, he wrote the business plan for NANOG (North American Network Operator’s Group) and served as its first chairman from 1995–1998.

He wrote the definitive book on the practice of Internet Peering, “The Internet Peering Playbook: Connecting to the Core of the Internet” and is an internationally recognized expert on Internet Peering and Internet Exchange Points. Bill consulted for governmental agencies, institutional investors, hardware and software vendors such as Cisco, Alcatel, LinkedIn, nVidia, Priceline, InterStream, etc. along dozens of transoceanic carriers, ISPs and IXPs across Africa.

Bill devotes part of his attention to sharing his knowledge with the broader community in the form of presentations and white papers. He developed 13 widely cited industry white papers on Internet interconnection that continue to be taught at universities around the world.

Co-Founder of NOIA

A lot of Bill’s work and expertise is devoted to Programmable Internet. The upcoming release of a whitepaper, co-authored by Bill, will lay out the benefits for the network and the sharing economy of internet infrastructure, and will serve as a guide for the future of NOIA.

As perhaps one of the most knowledgeable people in the internet peering business, Bill is leading the strategy and implementation for building NOIA’s Backbone to reach eyeball networks within milliseconds while providing large bandwidth capacity for enterprise networks.

We’re excited to have such a talented team, including world-renowned experts and entrepreneurs from various fields, each contributing to the vision of the next generation internet.

Bill describes the NOIA retail model this way: