Dec 7, 2005 -- Susan Crawford, a member of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law faculty since 2003, has been nominated to the board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a not-for-profit organization responsible for assigning Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and managing the worldwide system of domain names. Professor Crawford officially joined the board on December 4, 2005 at the conclusion of ICANN’s Annual General Meeting in Vancouver, Canada, and her term will end at the conclusion of the organization’s annual meeting in 2008. "Susan's nomination to the ICANN Board of Directors is well deserved and will inform her scholarship and provide an exciting aspect to her teaching at Cardozo," Dean David Rudenstine said. "She has written extensively about ICANN, is extremely knowledgeable about the issues and policy, and will be an asset to the organization." “The ICANN experiment is a big idea that meets a crucial need," said Professor Crawford on her blog. "It's not a regulatory agency. It's a forum for the discussion of global policies for domain names. Its form of standard-setting (which includes policymaking), done right, should match the way the Internet works: Most things should be left to local control, with only a few global rules imposed with which most people are willing to go along.” Professor Crawford, a well-known expert in cyberlaw, is the only newly nominated board member. She joins Njeri Rionge of Kenya, Africa, who was reappointed this year. Crawford, who is an advocate for keeping the Internet open and free, came to Cardozo from the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, where she was a partner. Her practice, which included litigation, counseling, and transactional work, focused on intellectual property, advertising, privacy, domain names, and ecommerce policy issues. Crawford is a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of Yale College, a graduate of Yale Law School, a Policy Fellow with the Center for Democracy and Technology, and a Fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project. Among Professor Crawford’s current projects is the founding of OneWebDay, a way to celebrate, according to Crawford, “the health and diversity of the Internet, and to remind people they need to work to maintain the values that have made the Internet a gift.” Similar to Earth Day, OneWebDay will be celebrated around the globe on September 22.