The good thing about the Darknet plan is that it levels the playing field - Sure, Governments might suddenly have access to influencing the infrastructure the same way that corporations have now - but I would argue that Governments have quite a lot of influence already. The important difference would be that ordinary citizens would have that very same power.

Unless you live in a predominantly authoritarian state (and I guess disagreement about this is what most of these discussions come down to, in the end), keeping government in check by empowering the people with insight and access to its processes is usually what enables a democracy.

Your point about darknet traffic being inherently more interesting is insightful, but I'm not sure where it gets us. The same can be said about TOR (and there have been attacks on this, too, as well as TOR posing the same issue of possibly being 'infected' by too many nodes of a single attacker) and I guess it' really just a technical challenge, in the end.