It wouldn't be a good idea to spell out an entire protocol in a comment section, but the key part is that it would cost a lot.

It is far from hand-waving. Right now we have numeric addressing, where routers look at bits and perform ASIC-friendly bitwise (and other) operations on that number to forward a lot of traffic really fast for cheap.

Identity and trust establishment won't be part of the regular data flow, but at network connection time, each end-device will discover the network authority it has connected to, and build trust that allows it to validate identities in that network, including address assignments, neighbor discovery, name resolution and verification, authorized traffic forwarders (routers) and more.

After the connection is established and the network is trusted, as part of the connection establishment, the network authority designates how addressing should be done. If Alice's Iphone wants to connect to Bob's server, it will encrypt the data, and as part of a very slim header designate Bob's server's cryptographic identifier, destination service identifier, and its own cryptographic identifier for the first packet. To reduce overhead, subsequent traffic can use a simple hash of the connection identifers mentioned earlier.

When devices come online in the network, their cryptographic identifers will become known to the entire network, including intermediate routers. Routing protocols work with the identity authority of the network to build forwarding tables based on cryptographic identifiers, and for established sessions, session ids.

"Cryptographic identifier" is also not a hand-wavy term. what it means must be dynamic, so as to avoid protocol updates like v4 and v6 over addressing. V6 presumed just having lots of bits is enough. An ideal protocol will allow the network itself to communicate the identifier type and byte-size. For example an FQDN, or an IPv4 address alike could be used directly, or a public key hash using a hash algorithm of the network's choice can be used. So long as the devices in the network support it, and the end device supports it, it should work fine.

Internet addressing can use a scheme like this, but it doesn't need to. IPv6 took the wrong approach with NAT, it got rid of it instead of formalizing it. we'll always need to translate addresses. But the internet is actually well-positioned for this, due to the prevalence of certificate authorities, but it will require rethinking foundational protocols like DNS, BGP, and PKI infrastructure.

But my original point wasn't this, it was that tech has come far, our requirements today are different than 30 years ago. Even the OSI layered model is outdated, among other things.

This is just my proposal that I just thought of as I'm typing this, smarter people that can sit down and think through the problem can think of better protocols. I only proposed it to demnostrate the concept isn't hand-wavy or ridiculous.

IPv6 was relatively rushed to meet the address shortage issue of IPv4 while at the same time solve lots of other problems. The next network layer protocol (and we do need one) should have the goal of making networking as a whole adaptable to new and unforeseen requirements (that's why I suggested the network authority be the one to dictate the addressing scheme, and with it, be responsible for translating it if needed). We're being held back, not just in tech but as a species, because of this short-sighted protocol design! exaggerated as that statement might sound, it is true.

I'll reserve further discussion on the topic for when it is required, but I hope this prevents more dismissive responses.

Not to mention authenticated identity-based routing would mean embedding trusted centralized authorities into even deeper network layers. That is such a mess for TLS, after CAs started going rogue we've basically ended up with Google, a shitty ad company, deciding who should be trusted because they control Chrome.