The Eight-Year Path From a Missouri Sheriff's Data Grab to the Supreme Court
In 2018, reporting revealed something that should not have been technically possible: a Missouri county sheriff had obtained real-time cellphone location data on a suspect without a warrant — through Securus Technologies, which had purchased it from wireless carriers. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile had been selling access to their customers' real-time location through chains of third-party aggregators, with no meaningful controls over downstream use.
The Federal Communications Commission opened an investigation. Six years later, in 2024, it issued forfeiture orders totaling nearly $196 million: roughly $80 million against T-Mobile, $57 million against AT&T, $47 million against Verizon, and $12 million against Sprint — all for violating Section 222 of the Communications Act, which requires carriers to protect customer proprietary network information (CPNI), including location data.
The carriers refused to pay and challenged the fines in court. On June 4, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in FCC v. AT&T, Inc. (No. 25-406) that the FCC's enforcement process is constitutional. The ruling matters. It also left open a strategic escape route the agency may not have anticipated.
What AT&T and Verizon Actually Argued
The carriers did not deny selling the location data. Their challenge was constitutional: the Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in suits where the value in controversy exceeds $20. AT&T and Verizon argued that the FCC's forfeiture proceedings — where the agency investigates, finds a violation, and issues a monetary penalty order, all without a jury — violated that guarantee.
This argument had real force. In SEC v. Jarkesy (2024), the Supreme Court held that the Securities and Exchange Commission violated the Seventh Amendment by imposing civil penalties for securities fraud through its in-house administrative courts. The FCC's structure looked structurally similar. The Fifth Circuit agreed with AT&T and vacated its fine. The Second Circuit upheld Verizon's fine. That circuit split sent the case to the Supreme Court.
How the Court Distinguished the FCC From the SEC
Chief Justice Roberts, writing for eight justices, drew a structural line between the two agencies' enforcement regimes. The SEC under Jarkesy could impose immediately binding, enforceable penalties through its own adjudications. The FCC cannot.
An FCC forfeiture order does not compel payment. It creates no immediate legal obligation. Its only function, as Roberts described it, is to enable the Department of Justice to file a collection suit in federal court — where the government must reprove the entire case de novo, with no deference to the FCC's findings, before a jury.
"Its only legal effect is to enable the Department of Justice to file a suit to recover." — Chief Justice Roberts, FCC v. AT&T (June 4, 2026)
Because a full jury trial remains available at the enforcement stage, the Court held, no Seventh Amendment violation occurs at the administrative stage.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the lone dissenter, argued that carriers who pay a fine in good faith — to avoid reputational damage or continued regulatory friction — waive their jury trial right without ever having exercised it. The constitutional protection, Thomas contended, is purely nominal for companies that comply. It is a coherent point: a right that costs you everything to exercise is not much of a right.
The Unintended Consequence: A Roadmap for Nonpayment
Here is the tension the ruling creates. The precise holding that saved the FCC's enforcement process — that forfeiture orders are nonbinding — simultaneously confirms that companies face no immediate legal obligation to pay. Blair Levin of New Street Research stated plainly that carriers could "simply take the route of ignoring the Enforcement Orders, not paying the penalty, and taking their chances in court."
Peter Hyun, a former FCC enforcement deputy, offered a more optimistic read: the ruling "returned influence to FCC enforcers in their settlement negotiations," since companies can no longer use pending litigation as leverage to avoid settling. But Hyun's framing assumes the DOJ will aggressively pursue collection suits. With a Justice Department whose enforcement priorities shift with administrations, that assumption is far from secure.
The ruling may have preserved the form of FCC enforcement while reducing its practical force.
The Statutory Gap the Court Could Not Fix
The carriers' underlying conduct was a genuine privacy failure. Real-time location data in the hands of unaccountable aggregators enabled warrantless government surveillance at scale — the Securus episode is not a hypothetical.
Yet the legal framework the FCC deployed — Section 222 of the Communications Act — was written in 1996 for telephone call records, not a modern ecosystem of data brokers, aggregators, and downstream resellers. The FCC had to stretch a thirty-year-old CPNI definition to reach the carriers' conduct. The aggregators and downstream buyers who actually misused the data faced no federal penalty at all.
Congress has not passed comprehensive federal privacy legislation that would give agencies clear, modern authority over location data across the full commercial ecosystem. The FCC v. AT&T ruling preserves the FCC's existing statutory tools. It does not update them.
Whether the Deterrent Holds
A $57 million fine against AT&T — a company with annual revenues exceeding $120 billion — is an accounting entry, not a behavioral deterrent. If the practical consequence of this ruling is that companies now factor strategic nonpayment into their calculus while awaiting DOJ enforcement that may never materialize, the already-modest deterrent shrinks further.
Proportionate enforcement requires penalties large enough to change behavior, and enforcement mechanisms reliable enough to make noncompliance genuinely costly. The Supreme Court has cleared the constitutional path for the FCC's existing process. Whether Congress will modernize CPNI's fine authority, and whether the DOJ will actually pursue the collection suits necessary to make these fines real, are questions the Court left entirely open.