For the past few centuries technology has advanced almost unopposed by legislation and government interference of any kind, but the author of Why Technology Assessment? has proposed that we long ago reached a point where technological progress should be looked at from a perspective of global impact  by the citizens and governments of the world rather than by those implementing them. The author makes a very powerful argument for the implementation of such an idea and pushes for his their own ICENT to monitor and approve all new technologies watching for possible side effects or direct effects of their implementation that have the possibility of making the world worse for majority of the people on Earth.
If implemented, this group would be revolutionary in scope and concept for a single organization to drive and direct innovation globally in a way that could possibly make the whole world significantly better instead of people with money doing what they want such as the case with wealthy conservationist Russ George dumping 100 tons of iron into the ocean in an attempt to slow global warming with massive algae blooms. The effects of this large scale geoengineering are currently unknown and this makes it a dangerous prospect for most governments with enormous budgets to research the possible downsides of geoengineering. Yet this man just dumped iron in the ocean to more or less see what would happen, even if he had an idea there is no way of knowing the effect of doing something like that on an ecosystem that large. It is these types of actions that a monitoring agency of ICENT could never prevent and would only end up dumping chemicals into the ocean to try and fix it and spending more money trying to enforce its ruling than most governments could spare for the UN right now. If this man can do something this potentially damaging without anyone catching on before it happened then how could having a large bureaucratic agency overseeing the publishing and sale of every new technology before it goes into market. If someone or a company creates a new technology of some kind they should be able to immediately do anything they want with it and not be punished by being forced to go through another patent desk like agency except it would likely be much slower because it would be a global agency. Such a force as that would likely stifle innovation along with probably running out of money extremely quickly. If innovation were to be stifled on a large enough scale then it could cause a stagnation of the invention and the global economy. In all new technologies should not be regulated more than they already are.