In the early 2000s, the alarm bells had already been sounded for approximately a decade that IPv4 addresses were running out. Its 4.3 billion possible addresses, considered unimaginably large, suddenly looked very finite, and the standardization of IPv6 was a process undergone from the mid 1990s up until its publication in 1998. Yet just a few years later, in the mid 2000s, rumors circulated that China was working on IPv9. The problem, though, was that no international body recognized it, and it seemed drastically different from the rest of the wider internet.