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        No. 25-406 · October Term 2025

        FCC v. AT&T

        Decided June 4, 2026, 8–1 · From the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit

        Question

        Are provisions of the Communications Act of 1934 that govern the Federal Communications Commission’s assessment and enforcement of monetary forfeitures consistent with the Seventh Amendment and Article III?

        Facts of the case

        Between 2014 and 2019, AT&T operated a location-based services program in which it collected and shared its customers’ mobile location data with third-party service providers such as Life Alert and AAA. To provide this data, AT&T contracted with “location aggregators,” who in turn resold the data to service providers. AT&T required those providers to obtain customer consent for each location request and reviewed their procedures, but it did not directly verify customer consent before transferring data. In 2018, news reports began revealing that some service providers misused or failed to adequately protect customers’ location data. In response, AT&T halted access for those providers, and by March 2019, shuttered the entire location-data program. Prompted by these reports, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) initiated an investigation and in 2020 issued a Notice of Apparent Liability (NAL), proposing a $57 million fine for AT&T’s purported violations of Section 222 of the Communications Act of 1934 and corresponding FCC regulations. AT&T challenged the classification of location data as “customer proprietary network information” (CPNI), asserted it had acted reasonably,…

        From Oyez.

        The Court's vote 8–1

        Majority: John G. Roberts, Samuel A. Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Ketanji Brown Jackson

        Dissent: Clarence Thomas