I don’t think google fear Apple having to offer a choice to users. They fear Apple defaulting to Bing or something else.

While most people might choose google when presented with a choice, possibly more people are just going to keep the default settings when not presented with a choice.

There was no bot net doing the outlines. The r/placeDE Discord prepared an overlay and distributed it to many other large communities and twitch streamers.

At the time or the whiteout the r/placeDE had 6500 active users in the voice chat coordinating to draw the outlines. A German streamer sent his 100k+ viewers to draw the letters. Other big communities also contributed.

You’re probably thinking of Lemmy.ml