Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did, it's called gemini: https://geminiprotocol.net/
I actually considered linking to gemini in my comment! The reason I didn't is to avoid a discussion of how I personally would design tools for an alternate web. I think gemini is a step in the right direction, but not enough to supplant the web for a large enough minority of users. Not that it takes many users - the web was vibrant in 1995 with 100x fewer people on it than today. I don't know that the specific qualit…
Nevertheless, it can be of interest, in case someone does have the ideas. (I have seen other stuff in Hacker News and elsewhere, too.)
What are the specific qualities you personally would want for a web replacement? (You are probably right that they are not the right ones for everybody, but still it might be worth to mention.)
About control, to curb commercial activity and abuse, how would you expect that it should be done? (For most things the existing security is good enough but for commercial business you will want a better security for the purpose of the identification. But, maybe you have other ideas.)
I also have my own ideas for what I would want for a web replacement too (but, like Gemini, it does not have to destroy or be mutually exclusive with WWW or with anything else; see Gemini protocol FAQ 1.13), which I had made available (I wrote Scorpion protocol/file-format specification document).
One thing is that, it shouldn't be between Gopher (or Gemini) and WWW; instead it should be between Gemini and "WWW as it should be if it was designed better".
(Also, Gemini protocol can be made by making a TLS connection to port 1965 and then send the URL and a carriage return and line feed. This is a simplified explanation, but it is good enough to find the specification document in case you want to access it directly rather than HTTPS or something else.)
(Also note: I think that non-extensibility of Gemini protocol/file-format does not really work so well as they had expected. Some files do use extensions not mentioned in there, such as SGR codes. There are also many other ways to put extensions, such as into the X.509 certificate (and since TLS is mandatory, such a thing will always be available), as hidden Unicode characters (since they insist on using Unicode), trailing spaces (like ProleText does), and other ways.)