Japan's national strategy on information technology, scheduled to be adopted Monday, calls for greater deregulation of the telecommunications industry to promote competition, according to a final draft made available to Kyodo News on Saturday.
The strategy is scheduled to be adopted at a joint meeting of the IT Strategy Headquarters, a government task force, and the IT Strategy Council, an advisory panel to Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori.
The draft also urges the government to enforce transparency in the imposition of rules governing telecom businesses.
In addition to measures enhancing competitiveness in the telecommunications industry, the draft aims to create one of the world's most advanced IT infrastructures in the next five years, with a goal of having a total of 40 million households with high-speed Internet access.
These measures were already incorporated in the first draft which was released earlier this month.
The final draft also says government ministries and agencies should realize the equal treatment of electronic and paper documents by fiscal 2003, in a bid to promote "electronic government," where public administration is conducted online.
The first draft, stipulating that Internet users should be able to have "constant access to existing networks at a very low price within one year," was revised to also say, "The government should swiftly implement every necessary measure to that end."
The final draft retains the goal of providing more than 60 percent of the public with Internet access by 2005 and a plan to study ways to allot radio frequencies using such means as auctions.
Mori set up the IT Strategy Headquarters and the IT Strategy Council in July.