CTIA Wants Supreme Court to Again Review Decisions Upholding Carrier Fines
The rulings expanded FCC data privacy rules and made it easier for the agency to issue huge fines, the group said
WASHINGTON, July 28, 2026 – The wireless industry is supporting T-Mobile’s bid to get a refund on a $92 million fine it paid the Federal Communications Commission in 2024.
The FCC issued fines totaling nearly $200 million to the three national carriers for, in the agency’s view, not vetting third parties rigorously enough before selling customer location data.
The companies paid but appealed, arguing the agency couldn’t issue fines at all under recent Supreme Court precedent. The carriers came away with a high court ruling that found FCC could issue forfeiture orders, but that they weren’t mandatory until the Justice Department sued to collect and won in court.
T-Mobile and Verizon have argued they wouldn’t have paid if they knew that was the case. They want the Supreme Court to give them the chance to make that argument to lower courts that had previously sided with the FCC — the high court simply affirmed those decisions when it upheld the FCC’s fining power.
CTIA, the major wireless industry group, told justices in a Monday filing that while the case was “a perfect candidate” to be sent back down as T-Mobile had asked, the group wanted the Supreme Court to review other parts of the D.C. Circuit’s decision it disagreed with.
That court, which sided against T-Mobile and upheld the FCC’s fine powers, also said that the location data at issue was covered by the agency’s data privacy rules, and that the fine amounts were not improper.
Like T-Mobile and Verizon did, CTIA disagreed on both fronts. The group asked the Supreme Court to narrow the FCC’s data privacy rules and make it harder for the agency to issue huge fines.
The FCC’s data privacy rules cover customer data a carrier has by virtue of its common carrier voice service, rather than its broadband data services.
The D.C. Circuit found the rules applied to location data regardless of which the user was doing at the time, since it was all the same infrastructure and carriers provide customers both services.
CTIA said it feared restarting the debate over net neutrality and whether broadband was an information service or common carrier service. Lumping location data from mobile broadband in with call location data blurred the line, the group said.
“Because the decision below purports to allow the FCC to treat information derived from data services the same way it treats information derived from voice services, the decision threatens to partially reignite perhaps the single most important regulatory debate for the nation’s communications and data providers,” the group wrote.
The FCC can also only fine companies $2 million for any given infraction. The agency treated each instance of sold data as an infraction, which is what led to the $200 million total.
CTIA wanted the Supreme Court to cap each company’s fine at $2 million. So did the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
That would still result in T-Mobile paying $4 million, since $12 million of its original fine was for Sprint, which it acquired in 2020.
“For decades, the FCC has claimed the power to destroy any business on a whim by slicing and dicing a single violation into an arbitrary array of ‘continuing’ sub-violations,” CTIA wrote.
