Not exactly the same thing, as it isn't a law.

Which makes it worse in many ways. The entire tech, business, etc world has adopted the same censorship regime without government orders. So who is giving out the orders?

Shareholders.

Why does Google benefit from httpsdns?

httpsdns in the chrome browser will by default go to googles dns servers allowing them to collect all the tracking data.

They could've done that without httpsdns too.

yes, but then they would have upset local admins for bypassing the local resolver. that is still an issue with httpdns, but now they have a better argument against using the local resolver as default.

the ideal situation would actually be to implement httpdns on the OS/router level and allow the user/local admin choose the policy. i expect that this is going to happen soon in most linux distributions.

Surely they could just as easily report all DNS queries to Google under the guise of telemetry or search optimization or whatever. And of course let people disable that, which about 0.001% would do.

Httpdns is too complex of a solution to the business goal you’re suggesting. There are much simpler / less expensive ways of doing it.

Before it, typing "hawaii Hotels" on the addresa bar and pressing enter would generate a dns search... Verizon et al woule intercept and send you to THEIR search engine.

It's the main reason google google pushed httpdns and chrome. So you go to google.com. google current money cow is literally AOL keywords.