Luckily, there isn’t anything particularly important going on in America these days. Now that congress has tackled the big stuff--deficits, Social Security, the health care “crisis,” the misguided war on drugs, the war on terror, and finding ways to improve education for at-risk kids, for instance--they are going after the next big threat to the American Way of Life.

Non-standardized downloadable music formats.

Congress is toying with the idea of mandating one standard for all online music platforms.
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During a hearing to discuss mandating interoperability standards between competing music platforms such as Apple’s iTunes and RealNetworks’ Rhapsody, lawmakers sounded off on the lament of many a hipster that wants to take iPod tunes to another device.

Apple’s proprietary iTunes format currently dominates the legal download market, but iTunes cannot be played on portable devices other than Apple’s iPod, at least without some reverse-engineering on formats. The Apple portable music player also does not recognize music file formats or digital rights management (define) systems other than the iTunes format.

“This interoperability issue is of concern to me since consumers who bought legal copies of music from Real could not play them on an iPod,” Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) said at a hearing of a House subcommittee on intellectual property.

Because what we need protection from--far more than terrorists and long-term questions about the American economy--is the fact that our iTunes Music Store purchases don’t play on our Dell MP3 players. A few days earlier and I would have been positive that this was an April Fools’ Day joke.

To be fair, I don’t imagine that this talk will go very far or that there will be enough support for a new, bad, law to be enacted. But it still galls that they might even float this idea, that they might entertain the idea that congress is needed to solve this non-problem.

It galls more that we hire these people to represent us.

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