The US Supreme Court has refused Verizon’s request to amend a June ruling so it could pursue a refund of the $47mn it paid over selling access to customer location data. AT&T, whose case is procedurally different, can still seek reimbursement of its $57mn.

Verizon will not get back the $47mn it paid over customer location data. The US Supreme Court declined on Monday to amend a ruling it issued in June so that an appeals court could consider the company’s refund claim.

AT&T is better placed. Its case is procedurally different, which leaves it able to pursue reimbursement of the $57mn it paid.

The penalties date to April 2024, when the Federal Communications Commission fined four carriers close to $200mn between them. T-Mobile was assessed $80mn, AT&T $57mn, Verizon $47mn and Sprint $12mn, for selling access to customers’ location information to aggregators who resold it on.

What that meant in practice was worse than the sums suggest. LocationSmart left a demo online that could pinpoint almost any mobile phone in North America, Securus sold location data to law enforcement, and reporters demonstrated the problem by paying $300 to a bounty hunter who found a test phone.

Regulatory speed was not the FCC’s strength here either. It told the carriers their practices were probably illegal in February 2020 and issued the fines four years later.

The June ruling is the part with consequences beyond these two companies. The court held that telecoms firms cannot demand an immediate jury trial when they receive a forfeiture order.

It also did something the FCC will like considerably less. Chief Justice John Roberts characterised those orders as preliminary statements that do not require payment until court proceedings take place, even though the orders themselves said payment “shall be made” within 30 days.

That reframing is why refunds are in play at all. Verizon says it paid only because the FCC’s description misled it, and the court left that argument open while, in Verizon’s telling, giving it no procedural route to make it.

The lasting effect is on leverage. A forfeiture order that is merely preliminary is a far weaker instrument than one companies have always treated as a bill, which matters for every privacy case the agency brings next, in a field where regulators elsewhere have already had to chase location tracking through the courts.

The European comparison is not close. Selling access to customer location at this scale would expose a carrier to penalties of up to 4% of global turnover under a regime whose fines already run into billions, rather than a fine worth a rounding error that is still being litigated six years after the warning.

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