Denise wrote:

In my book the packet doesn't care what it is carrying. Carrying a bit

of binary code or a text message is all the same. Doesn't make the packet a container of expressive content. That content appears to the

reader on the other end.

While Bob has produced some argument against this position from a conceptual perspective (and I think Bob and Denise are both right depending on one's conceptual starting point), it might be worth pondering the longer-term impact of IPv6 on the received wisdom that the packet doesn't care what it is carrying. One of the empirical reasons why Denise's position has become, for some, a legitimate conceptual position is that the original design of internet protocol was heavily weighted towards 'all information is equivalent' within a particular packet, with very limited capacity to differentiate packets while they remained in transit and not being sent or received. Clearly though IPv6, by increasing the size of the header and permitting significant additional information about the packet might produce experiences in the world which will require some revision of the 'packet doesn't care'. Perhaps though, it's not the packets that care or don't care but, rather, the systems which use those packets (both technological and economic)? There's an extraordinarily complex and altogether unseen world within the network (which in fact Denise helped educate me in over coffee somewhere at an AoIR conference I think) which is mostly divorced from packet contents. IPv6 however has the potential to bring some interaction between packet content and packet-switching system. M Dr Matthew Allen Associate Professor in Internet Studies President Association of Internet Researchers Faculty of Media Society and Culture Curtin University of Technology CRICOS Provider Code 00301J http://smi.curtin.edu.au/NetStudies/allen.htm +61 8 92663511 (v) +61 8 92663166 (f)