Blackberry CEO John Chen has a request to U.S. legislators that appears to be a frantic move to salvage his company: Expand net neutrality's definition to guarantee an open mobile app ecosystem. Ironic, isn't it?

Chen aims to ride the net neutrality bandwagon to a more open mobile app ecosystem that, theoretically, would serve to aid his company's products and services. In the process, he's making a bid to expand the definition of what is protected under any potential net neutrality legislation.

Chen asked U.S. lawmakers to expand the definition of net neutrality to include a prohibition against application providers discriminating against operating systems. The request was made in a letter sent Wednesday to John Thune, chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation; Fred Upton, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce; and Ranking Committee Members U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, and U.S. Representative Frank Pallone Jr.

The operating system Chen has in mind is BlackBerry OS, which reached peak popularity in the third quarter of 2009 and has since fallen from favour. BlackBerry, known as RIM at the time, sold more than 8.5 million phones that quarter, according to research firm Gartner. In the third quarter of BlackBerry's 2015 fiscal year, corresponding to the three months that ended on Nov. 29, 2014, BlackBerry said it sold approximately 1.9 million smartphones. Gartner said BlackBerry's share of global smartphone sales for the third quarter of 2014 was 0.8%.

Net neutrality refers to the non-discriminatory treatment of network traffic by network service providers, with some exceptions for quality of service and security concerns.

By: DocMemory
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