@Zergling_man >though I do wonder if IP itself is necessary, or if we could replace that with some sort of DNS-like system.
Fixed length addressing and subnetting is necessary to have efficient routing and allow for big routers to be functional, as having to do lookups of an arbitrary length address and IP packets with a non-constant core field layout will kill routing efficiency.

Tor onions and GNUnet addressing combines naming and addressing schemes with authentication, although they do rely on IP routing as the core layer.