This one-sided view lists only the pluses from the "governance perspective". It can have minuses for them too, depending on how their subjects and the rest of the world take it. Most of us belong to one of those two groups and can try to shade our actions accordingly.
Sure, but this technology has only been spreading in recent years. S. Korea blocks adult websites behind an ID check. India has also been shutting down Internet access around protests and the such. Even the FBI has seized domains by requiring ISPs redirect the DNS name resolution (for anti piracy cases), which is not that different from how half of the GFW works.
Action wise, I'm personally gonna stock up on a diverse set of VPN technologies... I don't see this trend being bucked any time soon by the trend of where politics is going.
