Comment by criddell

The DOJ / FTC / W3C / SEC / whomever vets all of the entities purchasing a share of the Chrome userbase. Part of the purchase agreement would be to have the update and development infrastructure in place and commit to updating their version of the browser and making good faith efforts to adhere to W3C standards for the next 3 years.

Once the sale details are finalized, Google pushes out a final update that changes where the next update to Chrome would come from (and it would be a random selection from the list of buyers).