It dissipates righteous indignation by making sure that people feel the satisfaction and the release of “doing something” (and thus not act any more forcefully) whilst said “something” is the least impactful thing imaginable.
It ultimately makes those who would do more do less instead.
Not only would that solve this little problem, it would reduce Google’s power and remove one’s data from the claws of US authorities (were the Patriot and Cloud acts let them mass track everybody using a Google product).
Just make sure you chose a non-US Linux phone.
Most online petitions are nothing more than a way to safely (for those targeted and for those amongst the authorities who support them even against the public interest) dissipate the common people’s righteous indignation, by making them feel like they “did something” whilst said something is just about the least impactful thing imaginable.
(Some official ones, for example those mandating parliamentary sessions on the subject if they reach a certain threshold, might not be so, though its unclear as it really depends on the legislation around it allowing politicians to just ignore it at will)
This bullshit will require a lot more than adding your name into a list on some corner of the web in some legal jurisdiction where they’re free to sell your private information.
Last time they tried it for gaming - with Stadia - it failed miserable.
It makes some sense for things like office applications (though of late the trust in using American and American-owned service providers for that has plummeted, at least in Europe), but for gaming it has so far failed miserably.
Even the whole artificial bottleneck of data centers being the only place where the most advanced hardware can be found would only translate into gaming moving to be cloud-based if game makers did not react to the current PC components crush by reducing the hardware demand of their products and instead all fully bet on cloud-based gaming as the future, a stupid bet at multiple levels not only due to the risk that gamers would overwhelming chose the games of those game makers who dissented and fit their games to the available home PC hardware instead of the cloud-based one but also because it could give massive influence over the success or not of those games to the cloud gaming services suppliers who could just demand more money to run it in their systems at all or to run them at higher speeds.
In summary, the idea that gaming would shift towards cloud-based gaming instead of going in the direction of continuing supporting last gen hardware, isn’t really supported by the results of past attempts at that or the comparative business outcomes for game maker from chosing one over the other.