> Any claim that Google would have helped China censor Chinese citizens ignores the fact that Chinese search engines are already censored.
So what? That does not make censorship morally acceptable. This would be the same as saying that using slave labor is ok, if you do it in a country that already accepts slavery anyway, and you are treating you slaves better.
> And by surfacing better information for queries, it can also help people finding what they want for things that are not censored.
Once the state is performing censorship there is no such thing as "better information". If all information is filtered by the government, then all information is suspicious.
> but do consider how lives of hundreds of millions of people will be affected by your actions/inactions.
I have profound sympathy for the victims of authoritarian regimes, and I absolutely do not believe that the way to help them is to collaborate with the very system that oppresses them. Pretending otherwise sounds like Newspeak to me.
> I know some people prefer to stick their noses up and hold what they perceive as the moral high ground
Maybe some people are like that, but this is unimportant. The important thing is this: you have to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others. If we in the west allow our companies to collaborate with systems that hold values that are repugnant to our own, then we will become like those systems, not the other way around. There will be nowhere to hide. No thank you.
Let's not be naive: say what you want about the Chinese government, but they are not imbeciles. If they did not perceive Dragonfly as something that would help them maintain their repressive apparatus, they would not allow it.