A communications ministry panel on Wednesday stopped short of making a definite decision on whether to scrap a law imposing various restrictions on NTT.
In its final report released the same day, a special committee of the Information and Communications Council, which advises the communications minister, concluded that it was appropriate for the government to maintain its obligation to hold at least one-third of NTT shares.
A task force of the special committee had been discussing a proposal made by a project team of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party last winter that the NTT law be abolished.
Three rival telecom carriers in Japan, including KDDI, have expressed opposition to scrapping the law, insisting that such deregulation could hamper fair competition.
Last month, NTT President Akira Shimada also said that the law could not be abolished at the moment.
The final report called for reviewing the universal service obligation imposed on the NTT group’s domestic fixed-line telephone service across Japan by limiting the scope of the obligation to areas where there are no other service providers.
Regarding the rules on investment in NTT, which prohibit foreign companies from holding one-third or more of the telecom giant’s voting rights, the final report called for introducing a system to regularly monitor the status of compliance.