First published in 2005, the FCC's Wireless Domains list was intended to be a list of domains associated with mobile devices (cell phones, pagers, etc.) and that senders of commercial messages were to avoid those messages unless appropriate consent was obtained for each recipient. It sounds like a simple "don't spam me" list, but the form of consent referenced "must include the subscriber’s signature, which may be in digital or electronic form as allowed under the federal E-Sign Act and state counterparts" and the FCC has said that the burden of proof to resolve any complaint rests squarely on the sender, so the net was that most email service providers prohibited their clients from sending to those domains, unless the client implements verifiable consent compatible with the E-Sign Act or similar. (A longer discussion on what constitutes appropriate consent might make sense here but I don't have the time to dive deep and my focus today is more on the Yahoo.com domain landing on the list, see below.)
Email industry insiders noted that the domain yahoo.com had landed on the FCC wireless domains list sometime in the past few days, meaning that if this procedure were to be followed, email services providers would have thirty days at max before they would be forced to restrict their clients from sending mail to subscribers at Yahoo Mail's primary domain name.
That's potentially a big deal! Thankfully, it seems to be recognized as an error and is being addressed. I know that both the FCC and Yahoo have been notified of this and my understanding is that it is likely to be resolved very soon, meaning that it probably won't be necessary for a bunch of senders to suddenly stop sending mail to their yahoo.com subscribers. Whew!
(Update: Yahoo.com has been removed from the FCC Wireless Domains list.)