I've realized there's another thing about this proposal that bothers me: it's basically waterfall software development. Agile is by no means a panacea, but there's a reason it replaced the "specify in advance what everything will need to look like and how it will work together" method. Instead, you need to just start building pieces that move you towards your eventual goal, roughly envisioned, and know that you will need to iterate on that frequently to respond to what you learn along the way. The motivation of this proposal seems to be that we can know in advance what the impact of a new piece of technology is, and therefore we can just avoid ever developing the bad stuff, so we won't have to deal with the hard work of changing it later.

But, we cannot, and it's dangerous to think we can. After we develop technology, we will be surprised at how it is used and what the impact is, and we will have to respond to that, sometimes with more technology and sometimes with legislation and sometimes with changes in social mores. Thinking that developers can just anticipate in advance what will happen, is at best delusional, like thinking that if we spend more time on the specifications part of our next waterfall project, we can do better.

Moreover, if Tim Berners-Lee had specified in advance, "this world-wide web thing will probably eviscerate all advertising-supported media, from newspapers to magazines to radio and television", I don't know that we would have made wiser choices as a result of that.