This paper presents a new Internet framework, called CogTag, using cognitive tags which addresses the current Internet issues from the ground up. CogTag extends IP and MPLS, introducing a light markup language to encode a sequence of tags and advocating semantic tagging of network entities as a new general approach to usher intelligence into the future Internet. The framework promotes a radical innovation in the cognitive annotation and processing of protocol headers, which will be done by XML-like semantic marking. The paper first introduces the design principles of the proposed framework, then describes the framework in more details and discusses a use case; and then gives a prototype implementation using Click modular router; finally it concludes and presents future work.