The Supreme Court today rejected Verizon’s attempt to get a $47 million refund from the Federal Communications Commission. In a list of orders issued by the court, Verizon’s petition was denied without explanation. The denial apparently ends any possibility of Verizon asking a lower court to review the fine and order the FCC to issue a refund.
However, AT&T and T-Mobile are continuing to challenge similar fines on grounds that selling device-location data did not violate US telecom law. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon were fined a total of $196 million in 2024 for selling mobile users’ real-time location data without their customers’ consent. The carriers sold device-location information to data aggregators, who resold it to other firms.
The carriers paid the fines and sought to have them overturned in courts, claiming their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial was violated. Challenges by AT&T and Verizon were combined into a single case, and the Supreme Court ruled against the carriers in June of this year. The court ruled that the FCC penalty process does not violate the Seventh Amendment because the carriers could have obtained jury trials if they refused to pay the fines and waited for the government to try to collect.
The ruling against the carriers was 8-1, with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting. Verizon essentially claims it was tricked into paying the fine and didn’t know it had the option to not pay. In a petition it filed after the Supreme Court loss, Verizon said the FCC presented the fine as binding in 2024 but then “retreated over the course of this proceeding, changing positions and ultimately telling this Court that FCC forfeiture orders do not ‘compel payment.’” Verizon reported quarterly revenue of $34.3 billion in Q2 2026, along with net income of $3.9 billion.
Having lost its attempt to invalidate the FCC’s process for issuing financial penalties, Verizon now wants another chance to argue that the fine itself wasn’t legally justifiable. It complained that the Supreme Court expressed no view on the merits of the fine, yet left Verizon with no recourse to challenge it.
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