Verizon is hoping that the court of last resort will take up its case challenging the $46.9 million fine that the Federal Communications Commission slapped it with after the company was found to have been selling off people's location data and the Second Circuit ruled the fine would stay in place.

The telecom behemoth has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, asking the justices to wade into the circuit split created when the FCC hit the nation's largest mobile companies with privacy fines and those companies appealed the fines to three federal appeals courts with varying results.

The question that everyone wants the justices to answer — the government has also petitioned for review in a different appeal — is whether the Supreme Court's recent decision in U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy , which limited the use of in-house agency courts to hand down stiff penalties, applies in this case.

The way Verizon sees it, handing down such a heavy penalty without the option of a jury trial was unconstitutional. But the Second Circuit did not agree.

"There can be no doubt that the remedy is punitive and thus legal, and that the underlying cause of action is akin to common-law negligence," Verizon told the high court. "So this should have been an easy case under Jarkesy."

Verizon added: "The government, however, has seized on a distinct statutory quirk to defend the FCC's penalty scheme." That argument is that the telecoms did have access to a jury trial because they could have opted not to pay the fine, and if the government chose to file suit to enforce payment, the companies would have had access to a jury.

"Because that potential collection action carries a right to a jury trial, the FCC sees no Seventh Amendment problem with imposing massive in-house penalties beforehand," Verizon said. "The Second Circuit and D.C. Circuit have both blessed the FCC's theory, while the Fifth Circuit has rejected it as pure constitutional circumvention."

It's time for the justices to step in and decide which circuit or circuits got it right, Verizon said, adding that an "after-the-fact possibility of a jury trial does not comply with the Seventh Amendment."

The agency narrowly passed Verizon's fine in April 2024 along party lines. Verizon wasn't the only one hit; the FCC doled out almost $200 million in fines overall, with the rest going to AT&T Inc. as well as T-Mobile and Sprint, which were two separate companies when the data was being sold.

The investigation that led to the fines stretches back to 2019. Then-FCC Chair Ajit Pai said in early 2020 that the probe into improper sharing of mobile customer's sensitive data had uncovered some illegal conduct, but he remained vague. Enforcement orders against the four major carriers followed.

The companies are accused of dealing with data "aggregators" that collected location data from cellphone users and then sold that data to location-based service providers without the cellphone users' consent, according to the FCC.

Then-FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who dissented alongside the other Republican on the commission at the time, called the fees "eye-popping."

Verizon took its appeal to the Second Circuit, while T-Mobile and Sprint took theirs to the D.C. Circuit. Both appellate courts decided largely the same way, siding with the FCC. AT&T made its complaints to the Fifth Circuit and had better luck. Earlier this year, that court overturned the FCC's decision under Jarkesy.

Verizon is represented by Jeffrey B. Wall of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP.

The FCC is represented by Solicitor General D. John Sauer.

The case is Verizon Communications Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission et al., case number 25-567, in the Supreme Court of the United States.