James Kinsella is a former journalist who became a tech entrepreneur and helped develop some of the earliest web- and cloud-based ventures in the US and the European Union, such as MSNBC and Interoute Communications, Ltd. He is considered a pioneer of early, web-based digital media including as president of MSNBC.com in the 1990s. From the early 2000s, he led the restructuring and development of Europe's largest, independent fiber and cloud infrastructure business, Interoute Communications, Ltd. Interoute was sold in 2018 for $2.3 billion.
Kinsella worked as a journalist for several US media companies, including the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and Time. He is the author of the book Covering the Plague, which shows how the media and medical experts fumbled the AIDS story. Kinsella was a founder of the first major media company's web-based venture, Time, Inc.’s Pathfinder. The site was a groundbreaking but controversial effort to make Time, Inc. and its parent company Time Warner the leaders in digital media. He later managed Microsoft's joint media venture with NBC, MSNBC, launched in 1996. He served as a vice president at Microsoft and president of the Microsoft-managed part of the venture, MSNBC.com. In June 2000, Kinsella became chairman and CEO of World Online, the European equivalent at the time to AOL owned by the Sandoz Family Foundation. The Company had gone public in the spring of that year but was quickly dogged by the revelation that its founder and chairwoman, Nina Brink, had secretly sold shares at a drastic discount to the flotation price. Kinsella replaced Brink as chairman and CEO and quickly set about cutting costs – including cancelling the private plane Brink had leased as well as stopping a multimillion-euro ad campaign featuring Sarah Ferguson, then known as Princess Fergie. Kinsella eventually merged World Online with its Italian competitor, Tiscali, in a sale valuing World Online at $5.1 billion. Following the merger, Kinsella became chairman and CEO of the Sandoz Family Foundation's other major investment in European technology, Interoute Communications Ltd. The Company was launched in 1996 to develop a pan-European digital infrastructure for the booming web-based sector but suffered from the collapse of the dotcom bubble. In 2002, Kinsella brought Interoute out of bankruptcy, slashing hundreds of jobs in the process. In the aftermath of the dotcom bubble as well as during the 2008 financial crisis, Interoute acquired a series of heavily discounted European assets, including the failed KPNQwest’s Ebone network and one of the world's first business-to-business ISPs, PSINet Europe. In response to the rise of data-privacy concerns and the emerging General Data Protection Regulation, Kinsella launched a European-based competitor in the data storage and sharing industry, called Zettabox. The company was described by the European Commission as "an example of a genuinely European cloud storage solution" and a "GDPR by design" alternative. He was widely referenced in the media as a GDPR entrepreneur. Interoute was sold to GTT in March 2018 for $2.3 billion.
Advocacy
Kinsella was a founder in 1996 of the Internet Content Coalition, a not-for-profit association of producers and distributors of original content on the Internet. Its primary role was to help create a responsible and business-friendly environment through advocacy, education, standardization and policy, with the secondary goal of preventing laws that might block the development of the Internet's creative potential. Two decades later, as a tech executive in the European Union, he worked to develop privacy tools to combat rampant violation of individual users' data. He also lobbied the European Union on implementation of the ground-breaking EU law GDPR. He subsequently pushed for the adoption of a US version of GDPR.
