Content Networking, or Content-centric Networking as PARC are now calling it, is an architecture which Van Jacobsen has been promoting for some years now. It's worth attention, both because of Van's reputation and because it's a very interesting answer to the question "knowing what we know now about what people want and what capabilities can be provided, how should networking and computing be structured ?"

"Content-centric networking is PARC's vision for taking the next step in data communication — a change in network architecture to make content retrieval by name, not location, the fundamental operation of the network. Our approach is to reuse and build upon successful features of TCP/IP, with the key change of replacing the machine-oriented IP model with a named content model as the basis for the central protocol that connects networks."

If networks work natively in terms of content – in other words, the name a user would express to the network to retrieve a piece of content refers in some way to that content item itself, rather than to some specific host on which the content can be found, then users can securely retrieve desired content by name, and authenticate the result regardless of where it comes from. (Refer to the paper on Securing Network Content)

Pere Monclus, with whom I used to work when at Cisco, talked at PARC a couple of weeks ago about how difficult Cisco finds it to implement support for new stuff like this.

23 Nov 2010 - Updated
As Named Data Networking, there is NSF funding for further research into CCN. The PARC technical report NDN-001 (Oct 2010) describes the project in more detail.

References
PARC's content-networking page
Discussion between Van Jacobsen and Craig Partridge ( free, despite being at acm.org)
Securing Network Content pdf
Pere's talk
NDN-001 report
Other NDN resources