I would have trouble explaining this to my parents, or anyone not familiar with how cookies or "cloaking" work. I just heard the BBC world report (radio) summar

I would have trouble explaining this to my parents, or anyone not familiar with how cookies or "cloaking" work. I just heard the BBC world report (radio) summarize this coverage a few minutes ago; it made it sound like - Google copies and stores news articles and serves them to users - Google decides when users have to sign in upon visiting third-party news site. These misconceptions are great if you're Rupert Murdoch. In reality, the change in Google's policy is minor: - You are permitted to serve different content than the bot got (i.e. make them sign in) if the cookie on the other end has already requested 5 (or whatever) articles - You could do that before, of course, but you would have gotten delisted for cloaking, just as with Google's web index. This is a new exception to that rule. Laypersons have enough trouble understanding that news sites are not obligated to serve their content to Google. Making the issue more complicated (even if this isn't very complicated to us) may not be a good PR move.