The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has proposed widening its annual review of competition in Japan's telecom market. The draft adds enterprise services as a market to analyse, new information-handling checks at NTT East, NTT West and NTT Docomo, and a separate verification of NTT East and West's utilisation businesses. Public comments run from 1 October to 30 October 2026, and submissions must arrive by the closing date.
The draft revises a policy first set on 4 September 2025. The date of the final revision is left blank in the comparison table.
Enterprise services and carrier clouds
The new passage on corporate customers says networks are increasingly sold bundled with apps, IoT and system integration. It adds that consulting and upper-layer services are said to carry weight in business customers' choices. The ministry would therefore try to gauge how solution services affect competition in network services.
The ministry's overview also lists a survey of cloud services sold to telecom carriers: fees, terms of supply, and how far major carriers use or depend on them. It gives network virtualisation and cloud adoption as the reason. A further survey item covers carriers' research and development spending, including joint R&D and cross-industry work.
NTT-related checks
Three NTT-related changes stand out in the comparison table:
- Wholesale information. The checklist for fixed-line carriers adds a check on the measures NTT East and West have taken, and how they are applied, to prevent out-of-purpose use or provision of information about wholesale customers and their users. The mobile checklist adds the same item for NTT Docomo. The fixed-line list also drops its verification of NTT East and West's network procurement transactions.
- Utilisation businesses. A new section would check whether the measures NTT East and West adopted to protect fair competition in their utilisation businesses, as defined in the NTT Act, are effective and appropriate, and whether they are being followed. A new table lists the items: network opening, network information disclosure, equal access to essential information, sales firewalls, prevention of improper cross-subsidy and fair treatment of related businesses. It also asks for competitor reports of cases where such a business is suspected of operating outside bounds that protect regional telecom services and fair competition.
- Group conditions. Compliance checks on the NTT group would run against a May 2026 guideline on fair-competition measures for NTT and related companies. The older text referred to the successive conditions set when NTT's businesses were split or reorganised. The overall evaluation would weigh the necessity and appropriateness of the group's fair-competition measures.
The draft also deletes a paragraph promising a revision this fiscal year to cover items scheduled under the 2025 amendments. Those items include statutory fair-competition conditions for the NTT group and moving utilisation businesses to after-the-fact verification.
Scope and process
The draft sets out what the ministry will survey and check. It makes no finding about any company. According to the overview, results for each year are compiled after a council report, targeted for around the following summer, and are used in revising ministerial ordinances and other rules.
The consultation is voluntary rather than under the Administrative Procedure Act, rests on Article 167-3(2) of the Telecommunications Business Act, and is run through the Information and Communications Administration and Postal Administration Council. Comments must be in Japanese and go through e-Gov, email or post. Any comment over 1,000 characters needs a summary. The ministry will not reply to individual submissions. It may publish the names of corporate or organisational submitters and their representatives, but not the names of individuals who submit comments.