She served as President Barack Obama's Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (2009) and is a columnist for WIRED.

[4] On July 1, 2010, Crawford rejoined the faculty at Cardozo, and also commenced as a Visiting Research Collaborator at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton.

In 2015, Politico named Crawford (along with scholars Marvin Ammori and Tim Wu) as one of its top 50 thinkers of the year, citing her contributions to the net neutrality movement.

In 2012, Yale University Press published her book, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

[11][12] Crawford was critical of the FCC's 2017 decision to end net neutrality, stating that the ruling was "handing the power to choose winners and losers online to about five companies.