T-Mobile Urges D.C. Circuit to Reject FCC Data Fine
T-Mobile made its final written arguments this week at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit against a $80 million fine imposed by the FCC for allegedly not safeguarding data on customers' real-time locations. T-Mobile was also fined $12.2 million for violations by Sprint, which it later acquired. The FCC and the government defended the fines in January during the last weeks of President Joe Biden's administration (see 2501130061). Oral argument is scheduled for March 24.
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Earlier this month, the 5th Circuit heard AT&T's oral argument against a $57 million fine the commission imposed (see 2502030050). The government defended that order in the 5th Circuit, though current FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and Republican Commissioner Nathan Simington had dissented.
“The FCC has no answer to the Supreme Court’s holding in SEC v. Jarkesy … that civil penalties are a quintessential remedy at law,” T-Mobile said in a reply brief filed Tuesday. “The FCC argues that its statutory claim is not analogous to a common-law suit, but Jarkesy makes clear that a claim’s statutory origin is no basis to withhold a jury trial, and the FCC ignores a long history of cases imposing similar duties at common law.” T-Mobile also argued that location information isn’t customer proprietary network information under Section 222 of the Communications Act.
The FCC also wrongly found that the major wireless carriers should have immediately terminated their location-based service (LBS) programs “based on one news article about criminal misconduct involving a single, rogue LBS provider (Securus),” T-Mobile said. The FCC knew about this conduct for months before news surfaced, the carrier said.
“This hindsight-based determination fails to grapple with the reality that a Draconian overreaction would have cut off valuable, even life-saving services offered by AAA, Life Alert, and other LBS providers,” T-Mobile said. “The Companies responded promptly and prudently to the reporting by terminating Securus’s access and then safely phasing out their LBS programs.”
T-Mobile questioned the size of the penalty as well, arguing that at most, the FCC could have handed down a single $2,048,915 fine. “The FCC faulted each Company for a single purported omission -- ‘failure to terminate its program or impose reasonable safeguards’” following reports of LBS abuses by Securus, it said. “The FCC still offers no principle to limit its statutory-penalty authority” and “does not deny that, under its view, it could have penalized the Companies for each customer’s data supposedly at risk.”