James Kinsella (entrepreneur)

Interoute was sold to GTT in March 2018 for $2.3 billion (€1.9 billion).

In the aftermath of the dot-com bubble and financial crisis of 2007–2008, 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 June 2000, Kinsella became chairman and CEO of World Online, the European equivalent of 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.

Kinsella was a founder of the first major media company's web-based venture, Time, Inc.’s Pathfinder. 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.

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. The move was controversial because it resulted in the loss of hundreds of jobs. A subsequent partnership with Greek operator OTE to provide high-speed bandwidth to Greece in the run-up to the Olympics helped the company survive.

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.

Kinsella worked as a journalist for several U.S. media companies, including the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and Time. While on sabbatical from the Herald Examiner, where he was the editor of the editorial pages, Kinsella was a fellow at Columbia University’s Garnett Center for Media Studies. His research of the media coverage of the AIDS epidemic, first published by the New England Journal of Public Policy in 1988, formed the basis of his 1989 book Covering the Plague, which shows how the media and medical experts fumbled the AIDS story.

James Kinsella (born 10 October 1959) is an American tech entrepreneur and former journalist and helped develop some of the earliest web- and cloud-based ventures in the United States and the European Union. He is considered a pioneer of early, web-based digital media. He served as president of MSNBC.com in the 1990s and as CEO at Interoute Communications, Ltd.