Impact of Supreme Court’s FCC Fine Ruling Still Unclear: Experts
Small fines may become less common
WASHINGTON, June 26, 2026 – It’s still not entirely clear how the Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement process or priorities will change after a recent Supreme Court decision found its initial fines were not legally binding, experts said Thursday.
“Some of this is going to just take time to be clearer,” said Jeremy Marcus, an attorney at Lerman Senter and former deputy chief of the FCC’s enforcement bureau. “As it becomes clearer over time what’s important to the FCC, what sort of cases the DOJ is willing to pursue, that may affect the cases [the FCC] pursues.”
He spoke on a webinar hosted by the Federal Communications Bar Association.
The Supreme Court earlier this month upheld the FCC’s authority to issue fines, but on the logic that its fines didn’t mandate payment until the Department of Justice sued to collect them. AT&T and Verizon had argued that the lack of a jury trial until a DOJ action meant the FCC’s fines violated the Seventh Amendment.
But the decision doesn’t necessarily mean it will be easy, or in a company’s best interest, to refuse payment, said Boyd Garriott, an associate at telecom law firm Wiley Rein.
“If you're a provider such that all of your business intersects with the FCC in some way, I think even with this decision it’s going to be pretty hard to stare down the agency and say, ‘No, I’m not playing ball, and you can take me to court if you want to,’” he said. “I’m not saying that won’t ever happen, but still, it’s difficult to do that.”
The agency is barred from explicitly holding unpaid fines against a company, which the Supreme Court affirmed, but the panelists agreed it was preferable to be on the good side of a regulator that controls the lifeblood of one’s business.
Suzanne Tetreault, a partner at Wilkinson Barker Knaur and former deputy chief of multiple FCC bureaus, said bigger fines, like the ones the carriers were fighting in the Supreme Court case, would still carry weight because the DOJ would be likely to back the FCC up in those cases.
“Nobody’s going to question whether the Justice Department will go to bat for the FCC if the FCC’s got $20 million at stake,” she said. “They’ll bring that case.”
She said smaller fines might become less common though, because it wasn’t worth the money to litigate if companies didn’t pay.
Marcus said the agency had other tools for those situations, like rulemakings or negotiating settlement agreements if companies were eager to make an issue go away.
He pointed to the agency’s robocall mitigation database, which companies that handle voice calls can be removed from if they don’t have sufficient anti-robocall policies. That results in their call traffic being blocked.
The agency removed one provider from the database earlier this month after the company failed to respond to a notice of suspected illegal traffic.
“That’s a big deal,” he said. “If your calls aren't carried, that’s sort of a death sentence for your business. And there are other tools like that that I think the FCC may explore.”
Still, there are reasons a company might find it preferable to refuse a fine and press the issue in court with the DOJ, the panelists said.
“I think there are cases where, if the dollar amount is high enough and the precedent is important enough, it’s going to be worth it for the parties to fight it out,” Garriott said.
Tetreault said the DOJ can be more generous in its settlement offers than the FCC, and it could be worth it to deal with that agency and get a better deal to end the case than the FCC would offer.
