A US appeals court upheld a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fine of $46.9 million against Verizon for illegally selling subscribers’ real-time locations to third-party distributors without their consent.

A three-judge panel of the appeals court rejected Verizon’s argument the FCC’s liability finding “was arbitrary and capricious” in a filing yesterday (10 September.)

Verizon also stated in the filing “the penalty exceeds the statutory cap, and the imposition of the forfeiture, without a jury trial, violated its Seventh Amendment rights”.

The court disagreed, and stated “the customer data at issue plainly qualifies as customer proprietary network information”.

Last year, the FCC finalised nearly $200 million in fines against AT&T, T-Mobile US and Verizon, following the completion of Notices of Apparent Liability (NAL) issued against the mobile operators in February 2020.

The FCC Enforcement Bureau’s investigations of the operators found that each sold access to its customers’ location information to “aggregators,” who then resold access to such information to third-party location-based service providers.

In April 2024, after reviews of the operators’ NAL responses, FCC commissioners voted along party lines to fine AT&T $57 million, Verizon $46.9 million and T-Mobile $80 million.

Former FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel, a member of the Democratic Party, voted in favour of the fines while current chair Brendan Carr, a member of the Republican Party, voted against them.

Verizon paid the penalty and filed a legal petition for a review by the appeals court.