I've been hoping to see something tangible from VJ on this for awhile now. He was doing content-based networking even back when he was at Cisco.
To an extent I think recognized by a lot of networking researchers, including IIRC YC's Robert Morris at MIT, the future of the Internet is probably not IPv6 and a network consisting of operating systems addressed by scalar integers.
Instead, IP-type protocols are going to assume the same role that Ethernet and 802.11 (and ATM) play today, as a substrate for connectivity on top of which real applications will be built. The wide area discovery and "session" (OSI style) management roles played by IP and TCP will be played by overlay networks. We have primitive overlays now (DHTs, BitTorrent, Skype) and proprietary ones (CDNs like Akamai, whatever the cable content providers are using to push VOD to the edge), but eventually we'll get a general-purpose open one and the game will be on.
I think this follows straightforwardly from Reed's end-to-end argument. Intelligence belongs to the edges, not the core of the network; intelligence at the core is necessarily a lowest-common-denominator affair, and is hard to scale. That's a key reason why we don't have multicast today. Routers are so bad at scale that tier 1 NSPs filtered BGP announcements by prefix length, because they couldn't handle /32-granular routing for even the tiny subset of machines that actually wanted it (begging the question of how we ever expect IPv6 to do the things the typical HN reader hopes they'll do, like provide them with their own portable /16-equivalents). Multicast effectively asked those same overtaxed routers to address web pages, individually.
That's obviously not going to work when the service model involves random people demanding that AT&T and Level3 add routing table entries for their podcasts. But it scales just fine when the thousands of machines interested in those podcasts share a protocol and an infrastructure for arranging a fan-out overlay.
So many unsolved problems here, from "what is the most reasonable kernel of overlay assembly, group management, and routing to deploy to end-systems" to "how do we avoid congestion collapse in arbitrary group messaging protocols" (a study of multicast reliability algorithms --- at least, from the late 90s when I last did this stuff --- will probably horrify you). But the great thing about it is, nobody has to ask permission to make this stuff work; we can evolve to the real next Internet without getting Comcast's permission, or for that matter (more perniciously) the IETF's.