c Is a Registration Bound, Not a Traveler's Speed - A Registration-Based Interpretation of the Information Speed Limit

This paper states a narrow interpretive claim about the constant c. It does not modify the equations or predictions of special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, or quantum field theory. The claim is that c should be read as an invariant registration bound rather than as a traveler-owned speed. In ordinary operational language, c is called the speed of light. This paper preserves that operational shorthand while denying the stronger ontology often smuggled into it: that light is a photon-object traveling through spacetime with c as its own speed. Once the photon is denied a rest frame, internal proper time, and internally traversed route, c cannot be the speed of a photon traveler. The paper also extends the same discipline to massive systems. A rocket or other massive object has zero velocity in its own rest frame. Therefore c is not a maximum self-speed possessed by the rocket. It is the invariant causal bound governing observer-side registration of cross-frame relations. The result is interpretive: the traveler is removed, while the invariant bound remains.