Unfortunately, I don't know of any good pedagogical resource that explains "what makes the Internet actually work".
Nor, for that matter, can I think of any single person who can answer more than a small portion of that question. I know that I can't.
That may be so, but the time needed to accomplish that task is likely to exceed the lifetime of anyone reading this newsgroup. The current Internet, as hardware, software, and protocols, is the result of 35 or so years of the labor of thousands of hardware, software, and protocol engineers.
IPv6 stands for "Internet Protocol, version 6". The current IP, which has been in place since the transition to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983, is IPv4.
A simplistic explanation of IP is that it is the protocol that does the addressing. The 32-bit values, expressed as four 8-bit values such as 10.44.105.69, are IPv4 format addresses.
The problem with IPv4 is that the Internet is running out of 32 bit addresses.
IPv6 addresses are four times longer: 128 bits. IPv6 was adopted a decade ago as the "next generation" of IP, and we are in a period of transition from IPv4 to IPv6.
Supposedly, all US federal agencies will be IPv6 by 2008, and IPv4 shall finally die in 2025. Many people consider these dates to be optimistic.
Although most modern operating systems support IPv6, there are many many older systems which are IPv4 only and will never be upgraded. Many of these systems are "mission critical" systems and are not easily replaced.
Take a look in any large enterprise and see what does the payroll. It's a jaw-dropper. Now, remember that many of these system were patched for Y2K but not replaced.
That's high on the "well, duh!" list of truisms... :-)
You can be certain that any effort to redo the Internet will be required to "fix" all the "design flaws" which get in the way of Internet taxation. To the designers of the past, these were features, not bugs.
You may not remember the war between the ISO protocol suite and TCP/IP in the 1980s. Basically, ISO was designed by governments and commercial organizations; TCP/IP was designed by researchers and hackers. TCP/IP won because it worked and was available then and there, not because it was tax-friendly. There are a lot of people in the ISO camp who say "I told you so".
Then again, if ISO had won, we probably would not be having this discussion since Internet would remain a toy of the elite.
-- Mark --