The evolution of the Internet is inhibited by the routing system's lack of ability to provide instant routes at host granularity. We argue that it is necessary to divide the addressing into naming and location and use separate mechanisms for the two functions. We present the split naming/forwarding architecture (SNF), which divides the network layer into naming and forwarding layers. The design rationale of SNF is discussed and we describe an implementation for deployment on top of current network infrastructures.