Updated: The FCC meeting postponed twice this morning finally wound up tonight with a compromise. Details below.

Rather than wind up on the wrong end of a vote, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has postponed the commission’s monthly public meeting. Martin had included an item in Tuesday’s agenda that would have given the FCC greater ability to regulate cable operators. But he couldn’t convince the two colleagues needed to make a majority to go along, not even his two fellow Republican commissioners.  The 9:30 a.m. meeting was postponed first until 11 a.m., and then indefinitely.

Multichannel News: Martin is now willing to pull the item that would have triggered the change—a finding of 70 percent penetration by cable. Martin told reporters: “I had suggested to the commissioners after talking to them, ‘Why don’t we just end up requiring the industry to file all the data that would be necessary for us to determine that?’ Yesterday, the commissioners didn’t seem interested in that. There wasn’t a majority of it. Today there seems to be renewed interest in that.” MCN adds: “In the hands of committed cable-basher like Martin, a 70/70 finding could be a weapon to regulate cable operators as common carriers and set the price of many of their retail programming services. Martin could use the finding to attempt to require cable to lease broadband capacity to third-party ISPs.”

Update:  Late-night meeting: After dropping plans to force arbitration and postponing—for months, this time,—a vote on the 70/70 rule, Martin managed to get a couple of votes through in a two-hour meeting the NYT called “acrimonious.” NYT: Commissioners Robert McDowell (R) and Jonathan Adelstein (D) criticized the process and suggested he tried to manipulate data for his own agenda. Martin said the FCC’s own data “was not reliable.”

WSJ:  “The defeat signals rough times ahead for the Republican chairman, who is trying to push through a plan to ease media-ownership limits by the end of the year.”

• FCC Chairman Continues To Target Cable Despite Protests from Fellow Commissioners, Republicans