What's wrong with MD? Is parsing it more complicated than HTML? Why can't Dillo support rendering MD documents like it supports Gemini?

For GMaps alternative, there are Here WeGo or Bing Maps. For Android, there are Sailfish OS or Ubuntu Touch. For Chrome, there are Brave or Vivaldi (Blink-based). Google is not irreplaceable.

E.g. Vivaldi is Chromium-based but doesn't include Nano Banana.

But Edge, Brave or Vivaldi are based on the same Chromium engine as Chrome.

I have had vendors refuse trouble reports from Edge because they only "support" Chrome. It's ridiculous but completely unsurprising to me.

Serious question: why do you use Google Chrome in the first place, when there are better alternatives, e.g. Brave (crypto stuff could be easily disabled) or Vivaldi, both with adblocker?

There are already: Matrix, Jabber, Mumble, Zulip - all open source.

Discourse, Matrix, Zulip, Rocket.chat - all open source.

Freeloading? Bad word. There are plenty of free/open source alternatives like Discourse, Zulip, Matrix, so why would anybody pay for something which should be free to use and respect user privacy?

No, Discord/Slack is a mess. Interesting topics got buried in an IRC-style chat. Threaded BBS are much better for organizing communities, like Discourse. And it is open source, so no vendor lock-in with stupid age verification.

What's the difference if Apple gets $20B from Google and spends $1B to another company or just gets $19B from Google and doesn't spend nothing?

I suppose Apple is forcing Google to compete against itself. "Pay us less, or pay us more and we buy someone else’s model."

Also accounting optics means Apple can shows lower revenue but cleaner margins