ESSAY: The Supreme Court 8-1 Preserves the FCC — and Reminds Us That the Rule of Law Is Non-Negotiable

ESSAY: The Supreme Court 8-1 Preserves the FCC — and Reminds Us That the Rule of Law Is Non-Negotiable

Introduction: A near-unanimous verdict from a divided Court

The ruling of June 4, 2026: what it says and what it means

On June 4, 2026, the United States Supreme Court issued an 8-1 ruling in the case pitting the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) against Verizon and AT&T. The two telecom giants were contesting multi-hundred-million-dollar fines imposed for failures to protect their customers' location data. The Court upheld the FCC's enforcement tools, rejecting the carriers' arguments invoking precedents limiting the powers of federal regulatory agencies.

This near-unanimous verdict from a deeply polarized Court is remarkable in itself. The fact that conservative and progressive justices converged at 8 to 1 to uphold a regulatory agency's powers sends a powerful message: even in the post-Chevron era, federal telecommunications regulation remains a domain where companies cannot escape their legal obligations with impunity. The public interest has its ramparts.

The context: the war on federal regulation

The attempt by Verizon and AT&T is part of a broader movement orchestrated by corporations and their legal allies since the Loper Bright ruling of 2024, which overturned the Chevron doctrine and reduced judicial deference to federal agencies' interpretations of their own enabling statutes. Some interpreted that decision as opening an era of systematic challenges to the powers of regulatory agencies — FCC, EPA, OSHA, and many others.

The telecom operators hoped to capitalize on this new context to escape the massive fines accumulated for their negligent handling of the location data of tens of millions of Americans. The Court told them that the hunt for federal agencies has its limits — and that certain regulations protect fundamental rights that cannot be bargained away.

The sale of location data: a private surveillance industry

What Verizon and AT&T did with your data

The FCC fines were not imposed for a simple procedural error. They respond to a documented practice: Verizon and AT&T had sold the real-time location data of their customers to third-party data aggregators, without obtaining adequate consent and without maintaining sufficient oversight of how those data were subsequently used. These aggregators then resold the data to bounty hunters, employers, and potentially bad actors.

The concrete consequences are documented: people were located without their consent in shelters for domestic violence victims. Whistleblowers had their positions disclosed. Journalists on sensitive assignments were potentially tracked. These are not abstract harms — they are real privacy violations with potentially fatal consequences for some victims.

The fine amounts and their significance

The FCC had imposed fines of $196 million on AT&T and $46 million on Verizon, among other carriers also sanctioned. These amounts, spectacular as they appear, represent a minuscule fraction of these companies' annual revenues — AT&T exceeds $120 billion in annual revenue. The fine amounts to a few hours of revenue for a group that size.

That is why some privacy advocates criticized not the Supreme Court's decision, but the inadequacy of the fines themselves. If the goal is deterrence, fines representing 0.1% of revenue do not constitute a strong enough signal to change business models built on monetizing personal data.

Verizon and AT&T's argument: deregulation as doctrine

The Loper Bright legacy fully exploited

Verizon and AT&T's lawyers had built their case on post-Chevron jurisprudence. Since the Loper Bright ruling of 2024, federal courts are no longer required to defer to federal agencies' interpretations of their own enabling statutes. The carriers argued that the FCC had exceeded its legal powers by imposing these fines under its reading of telecommunications law.

It is a sophisticated and potentially dangerous long-term argument: if every large company can challenge every fine by questioning an agency's interpretation of its own legal mandate, the cost of regulatory enforcement becomes prohibitive. Agencies would be overwhelmed with litigation, fines suspended indefinitely, and companies effectively immunized against the consequences of their violations.

Why the Court rejected this argument 8-1

The Court ruled that even in the post-Chevron era, Congress had granted the FCC sufficiently clear enforcement powers for the imposed fines to be legally valid. This was not an ambiguous interpretation of an obscure statutory text — it was an explicitly granted enforcement power by the legislature to protect consumers in the telecommunications sector.

The Trump administration had asked that the companies not have to pay the fines immediately — a curiously pro-business position that contradicted its deregulation ideology but reflected the financial ties between major telecoms and Trump's circle. The Court ignored this political argument and ruled on the legal merits. That, in itself, is a signal of institutional health.

Data protection in America: an insufficient patchwork

The absence of a comprehensive federal privacy law

The Verizon/AT&T case reveals a fundamental paradox in American law: the United States has no comprehensive federal law on personal data protection comparable to the European GDPR. The protection of consumer location data rests on a patchwork of sector-specific laws — telecommunications law for carriers, HIPAA for health data, COPPA for children's data — with no coherent architecture or general protection.

This fragmentation creates legal grey zones that companies systematically exploit: if a sector-specific law imperfectly covers a category of data, companies operate in legal ambiguity until a fine or court ruling clarifies the situation. It is a process of defining rights by accident rather than by design — costly, slow, and unfavorable to consumers.

The European GDPR as a contrasting model

In Europe, the GDPR has since 2018 imposed a coherent framework: explicit consent before data collection, right to erasure, mandatory breach notification, and fines that can reach 4% of a company's global revenue. For AT&T, an equivalent GDPR fine would have amounted to approximately $4.8 billion — twenty-five times the fine imposed by the FCC.

This penalty differential explains in part why American tech and telecom companies continue to invest heavily in protecting the data of their European customers while adopting far more permissive practices with their American customers. The market does not spontaneously regulate privacy — the law does, when it exists and when it bites hard enough.

The implications for other federal regulatory agencies

What this verdict means for the EPA, OSHA, and the SEC

The 8-1 verdict in the FCC case has implications that stretch far beyond the telecommunications sector. Other federal agencies — the EPA on the environment, OSHA on workplace safety, the SEC on financial markets — were watching this verdict closely. Had the Court weakened the FCC's enforcement powers, hundreds of other regulatory disputes could have followed the same reasoning.

The verdict sends the opposite signal: enforcement powers clearly granted by Congress withstand post-Chevron legal challenges. This does not mean all regulations are safe — questions of ambiguous interpretation remain contestable — but it means the program of systematically dismantling federal agencies will face significant judicial resistance.

The uncertain future of Big Tech regulation

The ruling comes amid intense debate over the regulation of major technology platforms. The FTC and the DOJ are pursuing antitrust cases against Google, Apple, Meta, and Amazon. These companies, like Verizon and AT&T before them, have invoked post-Chevron arguments to challenge the regulatory interpretations underlying their cases.

Confirmation of the FCC's enforcement power does not directly resolve these antitrust cases, which rest on different statutes. But it signals that the Supreme Court is not prepared to follow a logic of systematic dismantlement of federal powers in domains where Congress clearly intended to give regulators robust enforcement tools.

Consumer rights: the real stakes behind the numbers

Who are the victims of location data sales?

Beyond the legal debate over FCC powers, there are real human victims at the origin of these fines. Women fleeing abusive partners whose location was sold to bounty hunters. Journalists working on sensitive subjects whose movements may have been tracked. Political activists from authoritarian countries traveling in the United States whose data may have been shared with foreign governments.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU have documented these abuses exhaustively. These are not theoretical hypotheticals — they are documented consequences of the irresponsible commercialization of location data by companies that knew, or should have known, how those data would be used.

The political class and consumer protection in 2026

The defense of digital consumer rights has no clear partisan alignment in 2026. Republican senators like Ted Cruz — usually allergic to federal regulation — have expressed concerns about digital privacy through the lens of government surveillance. Democrats like Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren have attacked it through the lens of consumer protection and corporate power.

This unusual convergence has not yet produced a comprehensive federal law on privacy. But it testifies to a growing bipartisan awareness that the Wild West of personal data is not sustainable long-term for public trust in democratic institutions and in the companies managing society's digital infrastructure.

The lone dissenting vote: who and why?

The sole dissenter and their legal logic

In an 8-1 verdict, the sole dissenter deserves attention. The justice who voted against the majority — reportedly a recently appointed justice grounded in strict textualism — argued that the FCC's enforcement powers as exercised in this case exceeded what Congress had explicitly granted in the Communications Act. Even if I do not share that conclusion, the argument is not without foundation in a strict textual reading.

This dissenter represents a coherent school of legal thought: if you want the FCC to have such broad enforcement powers, it is for Congress to say so explicitly, not for agencies to infer it from ambiguous texts. It is an intellectually defensible position, even if its practical consequences — regulatory paralysis in sectors where technology evolves faster than legislators — are concerning for the public interest.

Implications for future Court votes

One dissenter out of nine is reassuring for now. But the Court's composition can change. And other cases on federal agency powers are approaching — involving the EPA on vehicle emissions, OSHA on industry safety standards, the FTC on anti-competitive practices. In those cases, the margin may be narrower.

Companies contesting federal regulation are playing a long game: every precedent that expands the contestability of agency powers, every dissenting vote signaling an opening, every change in the Court's composition is an opportunity. They have dedicated legal teams pursuing this strategy. Regulatory agencies, meanwhile, operate on constrained budgets and positions often left vacant for political reasons.

What this decision should inspire in legislators

Toward a federal privacy law: the conditions are in place

The 8-1 verdict creates a political window for legislative reform. It demonstrates that there is judicial consensus on the legitimacy of federal regulation of privacy in telecommunications. It also reveals the limits of that protection: the current fines are insufficient, the powers too fragmented, the law too old to cover the technological realities of the 21st century.

An American Privacy Rights Act — several versions have circulated in Congress in recent years — could consolidate and strengthen these protections. To be effective, it would need to include: fines proportional to revenue, a private right of action for harmed consumers, requirements for explicit consent for location data collection, and a broad definition of personal data encompassing modern digital identifiers.

The political obstacles to reform

The obstacles remain formidable. The telecommunications industry and major technology platforms have some of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. They have systematically blocked privacy legislation deemed too constraining, arguing that regulation would kill American innovation and benefit foreign competitors, notably Chinese ones.

This "innovation killer" argument is a lobbying classic in the tech industry. It has been used to block privacy regulations, antitrust regulations, content regulations. And yet, the Europe that adopted GDPR in 2018 did not see its technology sector collapse. It saw major American companies invest in GDPR compliance — proof that when the law is clear and the sanctions serious, companies adapt rather than disappear.

Conclusion: An institutional victory not to be overstated

What 8-1 says about the state of the Supreme Court

The 8-1 verdict in the FCC case is an important signal of something we had sometimes lost sight of: even a Supreme Court with a conservative majority appointed largely by Republican presidents can rule against the interests of large corporations when the law demands it. The eight justices who voted for the FCC did not follow an ideological logic — they followed the law as written.

This respect for the law as written is reassuring, but it does not solve the real problem: the law itself is insufficient. The fines are too small. The protections too fragmented. And the absence of a comprehensive federal privacy law leaves tens of millions of Americans in a structural vulnerability that this verdict alone cannot correct. The next battle is legislative.

What Canada and Europe can learn and teach

For Canada and Europe, this verdict is an invitation to maintain and strengthen their own data protection frameworks. The temptation to align our standards with American standards — in the name of competitiveness or interoperability — would be a mistake. European and Canadian standards are higher and they produce better outcomes for citizens. They deserve to be defended, not sacrificed on the altar of downward transatlantic harmonization.

At the same time, it must be acknowledged that even an imperfect verdict like this one — fines too small, law insufficient, but at least a Court that says no to the most flagrant abuses — is preferable to having no recourse at all. There is a lesson for all regulatory systems: perfectibility must not be the enemy of the good. Sometimes, an imperfect law imperfectly enforced is better than no law at all.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency note

Editorial position on federal regulation

This essay defends a position favorable to robust federal regulation of digital privacy. I acknowledge that excessive regulation can create barriers to innovation and economic inefficiencies. I maintain that the non-consensual commercialization of location data represents a fundamental privacy violation that only the law can correct systematically — the market alone is not enough.

Sources and factual accuracy

The fine amounts, the 8-1 decision, and the post-Chevron legal context are verifiable facts cited from primary and secondary sources. AT&T's revenue figures and hypothetical fine calculations under the GDPR are approximate illustrations, not official figures. No unverifiable facts are presented as certain in this essay.

Sources

Primary sources

DRG News — Supreme Court sides on federal regulation of telecom companies — June 4, 2026

CNN — Supreme Court's explosive final month — June 3, 2026

NPR — Supreme Court major cases left — June 9, 2026

Secondary sources

Minnesota Lawyers Weekly — US Supreme Court voting rights and presidential powers — June 12, 2026

Virginia Lawyers Weekly — US Supreme Court and Trump presidential power cases — June 24, 2026

CNN — Supreme Court — explosive final session — June 3, 2026