Media is a natural monopoly. without barriers you inevitably end up with the likes of Murdoch Media owning everything. You should know better than anyone else considering your employer owns everything from search to ads to videosharing in all the countries without protectionalism. I've had to resort to Yandex or Baidu when it comes to certain information clearly censored by your employer, and I know people in China and Russia do the same when their search engines censor information. VPNs aren't some secret technology only HackerNews elite can understand, everyone I know under 20 knows how to install one regardless of which country they live in. Without protectionalism there would only be Google. Everyone would be subject to the whims of the US government and people like you. I'm not an authoritarian, I'm simply someone who actually understands how information is controlled.

> But if I don't want to read Pravda or GlobalTimes, I simply don't,

And your employer Google makes sure to always keep their articles at the bottom of the search page and label them "state affiliated media", all while reporting searches back to Fort Meade. Whether or not foreign news is accessible doesn't matter if people are trained to froth at the mouth and yell propaganda every time they're presented with it. And that's the comparatively tame stuff. Try looking up videos published by ISIS on Google. You won't be able to find it. I'm sure it's purely a coincidence that the media that isn't liked by Google employees is exactly the media that gets censored first whenever you decide to "fight disinformation".

> I guess my question is, why are you using a VPN, or participating in a website that would be banned in China?

You work for Google right? Presumably you have been to the Bay Area? Did you know that nonwhite Americans exist too? The rest of us have to deal with whatever new fearmongering against whichever ethnicity/religion/race gets associated with the enemy du jour. Doesn't matter what I read if some asshole who just saw 20 coronavirus articles with pictures of Asian people and Asian businesses on their covers tries to smash my grandma's head in.

> you don't trust your own countrymen

Yeah I don't trust my countrymen because they fall for shit like Iraqi WMDs and then forget about it by the time it's disproven. Every time India/Russia/China/Japan gets mentioned on this forum or pretty much anywhere else it's a contest to see who can generalize and villify people from those countries and their "culture" the most. Why should newspapers and social media created by people like you have global hegemony? Why should the people of this forum, who clearly have contempt for Russia, control what information Russians see?

Your whole "free speech" argument is a charade given how much people on this forum and elsewhere cheered on the forced sale of TikTok. It's not about free speech it's about making sure your employer gets to control everyone's information no matter where they live on the planet. If tomorrow Yandex took over the North American search market and the US government bans them I won't hear a squeak from you.