Apple iPod Essentials   Tracking the Pulse of iPod

For Christ's sake! First they're holding hearings on steroid use in Baseball and now there's a Congressional subcommittee hearing on Digital Music Interoperability and Availability. In essence, they're looking at whether to write legislation which will force interoperability onto online music stores and make Apple open up the iPod to other music stores' downloads.

Let me see here... the Republican party is supposed to be for less regulation, correct? And the Republican party more or less controls the agenda these days, right?

I don't think consumers are being hurt by Apple making the ITMS only work with iTunes. People are free to buy downlaodable music elsewhere and load it onto their iPods, and they're free to my other mp3 players if they don't want to use the iTunes/ITMS platform.

Those bums on the Hill didn't seem to think VHS and Beta-max interoperability was so important, or as someone else commented on this topic, that cell phones shouldn't lock you into one service provider as they do now.

Representative Smith is quoted as saying:

"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. I suppose this is a good thing for Apple but perhaps not for consumers."

Real Networks is the one to blame here, not Apple. They knew they were taking a chance reverse engineering Apple's AAC format to allow music from their Harmony service to play on it, and that Apple would likely block their hacks in the future.