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The point about data being identified by name and not location is quite strong I think. It pushes concerns that lots of applications would have under conditions

The point about data being identified by name and not location is quite strong I think. It pushes concerns that lots of applications would have under conditions of high latency and intermittent connectivity to the network itself, rather than having to be solved repeatedly with minor differences for every application. Encryption and authentication wouldn't belong to higher levels and I think that's right. I absolutely agree it's not a replacement for IP and that IP has its place. The point rather is to shift one's perspective on what IP is, the implicit constraints it has, and how under different constraints a very different model would be useful and IP would be a lot less useful there. Applications would not be dealing with symbolic aliases for numeric network locations because that wouldn't work.

nine_k 2y ago
Names need namespaces, else they cannot be unique enough. IPv6 is one such namespace, DNS (on top of IP), another, email addresses (on top of DNS) is yet another. They are hierarchical; the namespace of torrent magnet links is flat, and still works fine on top of an ever-changing sea of IP addresses. We already have mechanisms of mapping namespaces like that, and should reuse it. I don't think IP is going to be outright replaced by other transport-level protocols right at the Internet's "waist", but it can be complemented with other protocols there, still keeping the waist narrow.