We don't have to speculate, we've been through this already during the IE4 to IE6 era. Microsoft just did whatever they wanted with the web "platform", and so will Google. In Microsoft's case what they wanted was nothing . They weren't a web business, saw it as a threat to their platform leverage, and so just left it abandoned and stagnant for years. Google is simultaneously better and worse: they won't leave it stag…
For users, IE6 was an era of unrivaled simplicity where the essential hypertext purpose was already fulfilled. Trident (its layout engine) wasn't great but it got the job done. And that same era spawned alternative browsers around that engine, the same way we have Chromium derivatives today, where the real innovation happened. Tabs, ad/popup blocking, easy per-site searching, auto-cookie cleaning, etc. were all present in browsers like NetCaptor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCaptor) or Maxthon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon), which all used IE. Nobody had to worry about "will this page work in my browser".
For devs, IE6 was the closest thing to a real standard the Web ever saw... more than at any time before or since. Its monopoly created a much stronger de facto web standard than anything the W3C has tried to coerce or the WHATWG has tried to suggest. It allowed innovation around a common web layout, in terms of browser features, instead of overloading the DOM with flashy interactives that nobody asked for.
Then ActiveX came and went, competed with Java applets, Flash took over, Firefox and Webkit started taking off, Javascript got more powerful... and Microsoft's beautiful walled garden collapsed. What do we have to show for it, two decades later? Slower pages with unnecessary complexity, written in transpiled languages ten layers deep, with a UX more focused on dark patterns than getting to the point. What's your typical complex web app... Gmail? It's good, sure, but in replacing Eudora, we ended up with the messiest, jankiest, hackiest ecosystem in the history of consumer computing.
It was really too bad Microsoft was the one who got away with IE6's monopoly. If it had been a proper browser vendor who took (and maintained) control from the early days, the web would be a much cleaner ecosystem, like the walled garden app stores we have today.
Even today, we're back in the same situation with on iOS, where every browser is just WebKit underneath. iOS web browsing is thus a lot cleaner than than crapfest on Android, where every browser ships their own renderer and no two cheap Android phones ever render the same website the same way.
Frankly, I'm just not sure it's worth it? Twenty years of web dev later, and honestly I think it's just gotten worse. Most people still just want to look up restaurant hours or send a message to their friends or whatever. The rest is crust.