Telecom regulators don’t usually have public followings, except perhaps among other telecom regulators. But as soon as rumors began circulating that Julius Genachowski planned to resign as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), petitions appeared on sites like BoingBoing, Reddit, and Daily Kos calling on President Barack Obama to appoint a 50-year-old law professor and former administration official named Susan Crawford as Genachowski’s successor. It’s not hard to see why she has acquired an enthusiastic fan base in these precincts of the Internet. With an appealing blend of earnestness and feistiness, Crawford is set on turning the sorry state of broadband and wireless services in the United States into the biggest populist outrage since Elizabeth Warren went after the banks.

Dropped calls, patchy Internet, and exorbitant bills are experiences many Americans are already angry about. But to Crawford, the telecom industry is a problem not just because of its dreadful service, but because it is undermining the future of the U.S. economy. Like Warren, she has a knack for making her case against the most powerful companies—she refers to them dismissively as “the incumbents”—in ways the average person can understand. At a public hearing in California, Crawford scoffed at a contention by AT&T and T-Mobile that local wireless markets were competitive: “This is like asserting that my former hometown of Washington, D.C., has several football teams: the Redskins, the Georgetown University team, and the Gonzaga High School team.” Discussing broadband with Bill Moyers, she observed, “The rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out, and this means that we’re creating, yet again, two Americas.”

And like Warren, Crawford has become a dreaded figure to the industry she wants to reform. Representatives from Comcast and other telecoms have refused to appear on congressional panels with her. “My name comes up in discussions about the new FCC chair. I’m on lists,” Crawford has said—but she expects the job to go to telecom entrepreneur and Obama bundler Tom Wheeler. “It’s obvious to me that they can’t [appoint me],” she told me. “The incumbents would go bananas.”

In April, I met Crawford at her favorite lunch spot in Greenwich Village. She is tall with short brown hair, classic features, and an engaging smile, but can quickly turn indignant at the mention of an injustice—yet another reason she invites Elizabeth Warren comparisons. But she came to her populism via very different beginnings. While Warren grew up in a working-class family, Crawford comes from the reform wing of the old Eastern WASP elite of bankers, lawyers, maverick progressives, and artists. Her great-grandfather, a Republican named Mahlon Pitney, was nominated by William Howard Taft to the Supreme Court. Crawford’s parents were musicians, and she once aspired to a career as a violist. After graduating from Yale, however, she went to law school, and by the mid-’90s, she was on her way to a career as a high-powered Washington attorney.

High-speed Internet will be as important to economic growth in the twenty-first century as electricity was in the twentieth.

But Crawford was deeply moved, she says, by the injury in 1995 of her cousin, the actor Christopher Reeve, and his campaign in his last years for stem-cell research. “Life is short; get in the way,” is now a refrain in her speeches. In 2002, she became a professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School and a vocal critic of the U.S. telecommunications market.