• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 25, 2025

Earlier this month, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out AT&T's $57 million fine for sharing customers' location data, ruling that Federal Communications Commission violated AT&T's constitutional right to a jury trial.

On Friday, the FCC urged appellate courts that are presiding over T-Mobile's and Verizon's challenges to similar privacy fines to reject the 5th Circuit's ruling.

“The Fifth Circuit concluded that the FCC’s enforcement proceeding ... violated AT&T’s Seventh Amendment rights. This Court shouldn’t follow that decision,” the agency wrote Friday in a filing with 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is presiding over Verizon's appeal.

The agency sent a similar letter to the D.C. Circuit, which is considering T-Mobile's challenge to the fine.

The FCC's new filings come in a fight that began during the first Trump administration, when the agency proposed fining AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile for allegedly violating privacy regulations by sharing customers' location data with third parties.

The agency specifically alleged that the carriers sold access to geolocation data to aggregators that resold the information to outside companies.

The FCC initially proposed the fines in 2020 -- around two years after it came to light that a Missouri sheriff used geolocation data provided by Securus Technology to track other law enforcement officers, without court orders. Securus obtained the location data from the phone carriers. Around one year later, Vice Media's Motherboard detailed how a journalist was able to pay a “bounty hunter” $300 to track a phone's location to a neighborhood in Queens.

The major U.S. carriers have said they no longer sell location data.

Last year, the FCC fined AT&T around $57 million, Verizon around $47 million, and T-Mobile $92 million (including $12 million for Sprint, which merged with T-Mobile in 2020).

The agency voted 3-2 to impose the fines, with Republican commissioners Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington dissenting.

All three wireless carriers paid the fines and then appealed. Among other arguments, they said the FCC imposed sanctions without proving the allegations to a jury.

The 5th Circuit agreed with AT&T and vacated the fine as unconstitutional.

The FCC argues in its new letters to the 2nd Circuit and D.C. Circuit that this decision was wrong because the telecoms could have sought a jury trial before paying the fines.

The D.C. Circuit heard arguments in T-Mobiles appeal last month, and the 2nd Circuit is expected to hear Verizon's appeal Tuesday morning in New York.