Yes, its definitely not strictly a case of counterfactual mugging, it just struck me as having that flavor. I'll see if I can be more specific.

At the point in time when you are confronted by omega in the counterfactual mugging scenario, there is provably no way in your day-to-day activities you will ever get anything for your $10 if you cough up. However, having the disposition to be counterfactually muggable is the winning move.

The analogy is that when deciding what our disposition should be with regards to caring about people we will never interact with, it might be the winning move to care, even if some of decision branches lead to bad outcomes.

The OP has a story where the caring outcome is bad. What about the other stories ? Like the one where everyone is living happily in their protected memory libertarian utopia until first contact day when a delegate from the galactic tourism board arrives and announces that he is blacklisting Earth because "I've seen some of the things you guys virtually do to each other and there's no way I'm letting tourists transmit themselves over your networks". And by the way he's also enforcing a no-fly zone around the Earth until we "clean up our act".