Senior Vice President, Strand Consult
Roslyn Layton, PhD is a leading international expert on technology policy. She is Senior Vice President of Strand Consult, an independent consultancy serving the global mobile telecom industry. She is also a Visiting Researcher at Aalborg University Copenhagen where she earned a doctoral thesis on network neutrality by measuring the outcome of the policy across 53 countries over 5 years. She served on the Presidential Transition Team for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and her work was critical to the FCC’s defense for the Restoring Internet Freedom Order. She has testified to the United States Senate and House on multiple topics including spectrum, broadband, mobile mergers, competition, and privacy. She founded the think tank China Tech Threat to study the problems of technology produced by the People’s Republic of China. She serves as the Program Chair for the Telecom Policy Research Conference, the leading interdisciplinary academic gathering. Her recent paper on rural broadband describes the empirical case for policy reform to recover network infrastructure costs from streaming video entertainment providers. She is a Senior Contributor to Forbes.
Partner, Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP
Rosemary C. Harold joined the firm as a partner in 2011, specializing in media, broadband, and First Amendment issues. She advises a wide range of clients – including commercial and noncommercial broadcasters, cable operators, video programmers, wireless providers, and satellite operators – on legal, regulatory, and policy matters. Her work includes representation of clients in major rulemakings, transactions both large and small, and regulatory compliance counseling. Ms. Harold also regularly provides investors and others in the financial community with insights into developments at the FCC and on Capitol Hill, including the interplay between the agency and lawmakers, as well as inter-agency dealings among the FCC, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission on competition issues.
From 2005 to 2011, Ms. Harold served at the Federal Communications Commission, most recently as Legal Advisor to FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell for media and broadband issues, with a particular focus on First Amendment concerns. She earlier served as Deputy Chief of the FCC’s Media Bureau, where she led the staff teams working on major rulemakings such as video franchising reform and media ownership, as well as on major transactional reviews such as the Sirius/XM merger.
Before her government service, Ms. Harold’s work in private practice included FCC regulatory proceedings in the media, satellite, and wireless areas, diversity and EEO matters at the FCC and EEOC, and First Amendment commercial speech matters before the FTC, FDA and federal appellate courts. She began her career as a journalist, including work as a reporter and bureau chief for the Miami Herald, an editor at C-SPAN and, during law school, a columnist for the ABA Student Lawyer magazine.
Ms. Harold frequently speaks at industry conferences and events on media and broadband issues. She currently serves as the co-chair of the Women in Communications Law subcommittee of the American Bar Association’s Forum Committee on Communications Law, an adjunct professor in the Communications Law Institute at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, and member of Board of Advisors for the Thomas Jefferson Public Policy Program at the College of William and Mary. An active member of the Federal Communications Bar Association, Ms. Harold has served on the FCBA’s Executive Committee and co-chaired the FCBA’s Mass Media Committee, Video Programming & Distribution Committee, and Professional Responsibility Committee.
J.D., Georgetown University Law Center, 1991, magna cum laude
M.A., University of Missouri, 1985
B.A., College of William and Mary, 1980
The GDPR: What It Really Does and How the U.S. Can Chart a Better Course
Roslyn Layton, Julian McLendon
Note from the Editor: This article discusses the European Union’s new General Data Protection Rule...
The FCC Forgot Something in Piecing Together Its Complex Proposal for Broadband Privacy Regulation: Consumers
Rosemary C. Harold
Note from the Editor: This article discusses the FCC’s proposed rules for broadband privacy, and...