It most definitely would make the people more oppressed. Even if we ignore the fact that the searches would be directly tied to a person, as well as the fact that there are nobody better than Google when it comes to tracking users on mass-scale, then you just have to think about all the people who would stop using VPNs as a result of this. You'd also be a fool to believe that China wouldn't slowly force Google to assist them outside the search engine.
All domestic online activities are already linked to individuals. All apps and websites are required by law to do this so the marginal harm of having a censored Google is minimal, if any. People use VPN for a lot more than political searches on Google: Youtube, Instagram, Steam, Wikipedia etc. It's unlikely a censored Google will discourage using them all. on The other hand for those who'll never use VPN services, another search engine choice will greatly improve their access to information, especially in non-Chinese languages.
No they're not. The big players are, but that doesn't include all. For instance, my websites are available to Chinese users and have no tracking whatsoever. The government can see they visited the website, but not necessarily what pages they visited.
I suggest you read the previous Dragonfly threads, they were filled with Chinese users proclaiming that they hated paying for VPN just to use Google. I'm not saying everyone would stop using VPN, but a significant percentage would.
