The United States Supreme Court ruled 8-1 on June 5, 2026, to uphold the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to impose penalties on AT&T and Verizon for illegally selling customer location data to third-party service providers without adequate safeguards. The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, rejected the telecom companies’ argument that the FCC’s administrative process violated their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial – a constitutional challenge that, if successful, would have invalidated not only the location data fines but potentially the FCC’s broader enforcement mechanism across dozens of active proceedings. The ruling clears the way for the FCC to collect a combined $104 million in fines from AT&T and Verizon, with AT&T facing roughly $57 million and Verizon approximately $47 million.

T-Mobile and Sprint, which were assessed a combined additional fine of approximately $92 million in the same FCC action for related location data misconduct, are also expected to see their legal challenges fail under the reasoning the Supreme Court applied on June 5. The combined $196 million in fines represents the largest privacy enforcement action the FCC has taken against wireless carriers and the first time the agency has successfully defended penalties of this magnitude all the way to the Supreme Court.

What AT&T and Verizon Actually Did With Customer Location Data

The FCC’s original investigation and subsequent findings, which led to the proposed fines in 2024, documented a business practice dating back to at least 2018 in which AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint operated “location-based service programs” that aggregated real-time customer location data and sold access to third-party data brokers and service companies. These third parties in turn resold or used the data for purposes including debt collection, bail bondsman tracking, and in some documented cases, access by individuals not authorized to locate specific people – raising serious concerns about misuse that could facilitate stalking, domestic abuse, or unauthorized surveillance.

The carriers argued at various stages of the proceedings that the data sharing occurred through contractual arrangements that required third parties to obtain user consent, and that any violations of those consent requirements were the responsibility of the third parties rather than the carriers. The FCC rejected that defense, finding that the carriers maintained legal responsibility for how their customer data was handled downstream and had failed to implement adequate safeguards to prevent unauthorized access and use. The FCC’s 2024 enforcement order was the agency’s formal finding after years of investigation, and the carriers then challenged the constitutionality of the enforcement process rather than primarily contesting the underlying factual findings.

How the Supreme Court Resolved the Jury Trial Argument

AT&T and Verizon’s constitutional argument rested on the premise that the FCC’s administrative enforcement process – in which agency officials assess a fine and the carrier is expected to pay – denied them their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial on factual questions about whether they violated the law and how much the appropriate penalty should be. If the Court had accepted that argument, it would have created a requirement for the FCC to sue carriers in federal court to collect any fines, with a jury deciding the underlying factual and penalty questions.

Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion found a path to rejecting the Seventh Amendment challenge without ruling that the FCC’s administrative process is immune from constitutional scrutiny. The Court held that FCC forfeiture orders do not actually obligate carriers to pay – they are non-binding until the Department of Justice initiates a separate collection action in federal court. At that collection stage, the carrier does get a full de novo trial, including jury rights. Because the entire merits dispute can be relitigated in a proper federal court proceeding, the Court found no Seventh Amendment violation in the administrative process itself. Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented, arguing that the FCC’s process effectively functions as a punitive proceeding in which the agency acts as judge and the burden on carriers to resist enforcement is practically prohibitive regardless of the formal de novo right.

The FCC’s Data Privacy Enforcement Authority Going Forward

The Supreme Court’s ruling is broadly significant for the FCC’s regulatory posture on consumer data privacy. The agency has been pushing to expand its authority over how telecommunications companies handle subscriber data, pointing to a series of incidents in which telecom infrastructure has been exploited by foreign state actors and third-party data brokers operating outside the carriers’ oversight frameworks. The June 5 decision validates the FCC’s enforcement mechanism and removes what would have been a major structural constraint on the agency’s ability to impose meaningful financial consequences for data privacy violations. The ruling’s reasoning parallels the EU AI Act’s approach of layering administrative enforcement with judicial review rather than requiring court proceedings as a prerequisite for any penalty.

Consumer privacy advocates welcomed the ruling as a signal that carriers cannot treat customer location data as a freely monetizable asset regardless of how those customers’ data ends up being used downstream. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance and the Electronic Privacy Information Center both issued statements praising the decision, noting that real-time location data is among the most sensitive categories of personal information a carrier holds and that the 2018 practices documented in the FCC’s investigation exposed millions of customers to potential harm. The Supreme Court’s June term has now produced consequential rulings touching voting rights, telecom privacy, and FCC authority in rapid succession, making it one of the most consequential terms for regulatory law in recent memory.

What the Ruling Means for T-Mobile and the Broader Industry

T-Mobile and Sprint, which were assessed their $92 million combined fine in the same enforcement action, were not parties to the case decided June 5, but the legal principle the Court affirmed applies equally to their pending challenges. T-Mobile has argued in parallel proceedings that its acquisition of Sprint in 2020 means it should bear limited responsibility for Sprint’s pre-merger practices, a factual argument distinct from the Seventh Amendment constitutional challenge that the Supreme Court just resolved. However, T-Mobile’s constitutional defenses mirror those of AT&T and Verizon, and the June 5 ruling effectively forecloses them.

For the telecom industry more broadly, the ruling puts carriers on notice that location data monetization practices without robust consent verification carry real financial risk at the federal level, independent of state privacy law obligations under frameworks like California’s CPRA or the growing patchwork of state-level biometric privacy statutes. With the FCC’s enforcement mechanism now validated by the Supreme Court, carriers that continue to operate location-based service programs of the type that triggered the 2024 fines do so knowing that administrative enforcement is constitutionally permissible and that the resulting fines can reach nine figures. The macroeconomic environment of 2026, with carriers investing heavily in 5G network expansion while managing margin pressure, makes large regulatory fines a more significant strategic risk than they would have been during periods of higher revenue growth.