The Kansas legislation that would make it nearly impossible for cities and towns to offer broadband service to residents will be "tweaked" to make it less restrictive.

As we wrote this morning, the legislation was submitted to the Kansas state Senate by the Kansas Cable Telecommunications Association (KCTA), whose members include Comcast, Cox, Eagle Communications, and Time Warner Cable.

It was scheduled for discussion on Tuesday, but KCTA President John Federico just confirmed to Ars that the group will request that the hearing be postponed. The group's board met today and decided that "some tweaking of language is necessary in the bill, in particular how we are defining unserved areas," Federico said.

The bill currently states that cities and towns may not "Offer or provide to one or more subscribers, video, telecommunications, or broadband service" except in "unserved areas," defined as places where 90 percent of households lack access to any broadband service, whether it be "fixed or mobile, or satellite broadband service."

"Admittedly, that definition was overly broad," Federico said.

Federico didn't say exactly how the board will edit the "unserved areas" portion of the bill. He also said the cable lobby's board members "stand firm in their belief that scarce taxpayer dollars should not be used by municipalities to directly compete with private telecom providers."

In addition to preventing cities and towns from offering their own broadband services, the bill has restrictions on public-private partnerships. This raises the possibility that it could affect future broadband deployments similar to Google Fiber in Kansas City, but Federico said that isn't true and that Google itself never came up during board discussions.

"Google was never mentioned one time as our board deliberated on whether to move forward with this legislation," he said. "This bill has nothing to do with Google."

Because of a grandfather clause, the bill would only affect future broadband networks rather than ones that already exist.

When asked if the bill was driven by any particular cable company, Federico reiterated that it was "discussed by the board of directors and they decided to move forward with it."