Analysis
The Supreme Court rejected Verizon's bid to recover a $47 million fine the FCC levied against it, denying the carrier's petition without explanation, according to Bloomberg. The denial closes off Verizon's attempt to get the case sent back to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where it had hoped to argue it was misled into paying the fine and should be reimbursed.
The fine traces back to 2024, when the FCC penalized AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon a combined $196 million for selling customers' real-time location data without their consent -- data that in some cases ended up in the hands of bounty hunters and other third parties who used it to track individuals without their knowledge. All three carriers paid their respective fines and then sought to have them overturned in court, arguing the FCC's penalty process violated their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial by allowing the agency to impose fines administratively rather than through a courtroom proceeding.
The June ruling that set this up
The Supreme Court already ruled against the carriers on the underlying constitutional question in June, deciding 8-1, with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting, that the FCC's penalty process does not violate the Seventh Amendment -- carriers could have obtained a jury trial by simply refusing to pay and waiting for the government to sue for collection, the majority reasoned, so the administrative fine process itself was not constitutionally defective. Verizon's follow-up petition asked the Court to add language directing its specific case back to the Second Circuit for further review on separate procedural grounds; the Court declined without comment.
AT&T is not affected by today's denial in the same way, because its case moved through the Fifth Circuit rather than the Second Circuit, and that court's ruling was reversed and sent back for further proceedings -- preserving AT&T's ability to keep pursuing reimbursement through a different procedural path than the one the Supreme Court just closed for Verizon. The split outcome is a reminder that identical underlying facts can produce different results depending on which circuit a case happens to route through, an outcome that has nothing to do with the merits of either carrier's argument and everything to do with procedural timing.
For telecom and data-privacy watchers, the practical upshot is that the FCC's authority to fine carriers administratively for privacy violations, without a jury trial, is now settled law rather than an open constitutional question -- a precedent that extends well beyond location-data cases to any future FCC enforcement action against a carrier that chooses to pay first and litigate later.
