The primary use of the Internet is content distribution -- the delivery of web pages, audio, and video to client applications -- yet the Internet was never architected for scalable content delivery. The result has been a proliferation of proprietary protocols and ad hoc mechanisms to meet growing content demand.
In this paper, we describe a content routing design based on name-based routing as part of an explicit Internet content layer. We claim that this content routing is a natural extension of current Internet directory and routing systems, allows efficient content location, and can be implemented to scale with the Internet.