These are a loss-of-function gene edit, not transgenic. They aren't expressing any foreign genes or producing any foreign proteins. They are just not making a protein they used to make—polyphenol oxidase. It may be making a truncated version of polyphenol oxidase (they don't seem to have made public yet where they edited the gene) but the odds are that nonsense mediated decay is breaking down the RNA transcript before much of the truncated protein is made.

1) This really is a non-issue for banana, which commercially is essentially all one cultivar, Dwarf Cavendish (there are other bananas at small scale in tropical countries, but a non-browning Dwarf Cavendish wouldn't fill the niches they fill now any better than browning Dwarf Cavendish does).

2) You can still plant the original Dwarf Cavendish if you don't want to pay royalties. And the protection doesn't last forever. Plus, honestly, one of the reasons more of this work isn't done in tropical crops is that it's going to be impossible to enforce these IP rights on small holder farms in developing countries. I think the odds of anyone coming after the guy with a few plants in his yard are vanishingly small.

My feeling on these is: Did we really need this? I might throw away a couple of bananas a year. And bananas are super cheap. The savings to me is a maximum of a few dollars, and maybe a little less banana bread. I mean, it's an upgrade, but would I pay significantly more for it?

Since we're doing anecdotes, I have a counter-anecdote.

I live in a rural residential kind of area—2-10 acre lots, mix of light woods, yards, barns and paddocks for horses. A few lots away, there was an old woman who would accept feral cats from all around the county, have them sterilized, and then release them from her house. I put up a game camera in the backyard and I eventually stopped looking at it regularly because it was just picture after picture of cats. Another neighbor who has lived there longer than I have mentioned that before she started doing that, the birds in the area were much more diverse. Five or six years ago the woman died, the steady stream of feral cats ended, and the return of diversity has been VERY noticeable. I've seen maybe a dozen bird species I never saw in the preceding seven years, and species which were once rare have become much more common. I've seen far more squirrels and lizards, maybe even more coyotes (presumably because of more prey...I think I would have noticed feral cats capable of eating coyotes). The quail, which were easy prey on the ground, have returned in force—I see them literally every day now, after years without seeing them at all.

Feral cat diet composition isn't unknown—there are multiple studies in multiple locations looking at species composition in stomach contents and feces, which are cited in the Nature article.