There’s a storm fermenting in internet-land. Wine producers fear their geographic identity could be under attack from the online equivalent of a land-grab.

ICANN, the little-known but surprisingly powerful entity that controls the naming of internet domains, ruled last week that the sale of .wine and .vin could go ahead. To date, there have been three bidders – all of them internet service companies hoping to administer and sell on domain names ending in .wine or .vin.

One of those bidders, Afilias, describes its plans thus: “Wine TLD will be known as one of the premiere resources for wine information on the Internet.” Doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Except that regional wine producers are worried that companies with no connection to wine-producing regions whatsoever could start setting up their own .wine and .vin websites. Champagne.vin, for example, could be snapped up by a company based outside the famous sparkling wine region. Napavalley.wine, meanwhile, could be set up by a company in – let’s say – Burnley.

“Like other wine regions and producers, the Comité Champagne is concerned about non-wine related companies being allowed to use the internet domain names .wine and .vin and the negative impact it will have on the protection of geographic indications,” a spokeswoman for Comité Champagne said today, echoing comments from the Napa Valley Vinters association last month: “Sadly, there are many in the world who wish to illegitimately use our good name for their own profit and gain,” wrote the NVV’s Rex Stults.

ICANN’s advisory council, the GAC, is aware of the GI problem – but signed off the sale of .wine and .vin with an almost Gallic shrug: “There is no international agreement among governments about how to treat geographical indications and, as a consequence, no basis for an agreement in the GAC on safeguards that would offer additional protections.”

That’s not good enough for the European Federation of Origin Wines (EFOW) – or the European Commission, which raised the issue with ICANN itself this week. Both want to put a stop to the sell-off of .wine and .vin addresses unless there is protection for GI names. “ICANN and the applicants should be aware that they are facing a united front at the European level,” said EFOW president Riccardo Ricci Curbastro, hinting that the battle lines are increasingly being drawn on an EU vs US divide (ICANN is an independent, non-profit body headquartered in Los Angeles).

The scrap over .wine is yet another sign that ICANN opened a gigantic global can of worms when it put some 2,000 generic top-level domains up for sale in 2011. (Among them is the suffix .grocery, currently being fought over by Safeway Inc and Walmart.) But with charges of $185,000 per application, ICANN at least stands to do very well out of the process. Smaller wine producers, who cannot afford to bid for a top-level domain – or even a secondary domain such as Bordeaux.vin – and who face the prospect of having to police companies using such domains, may find .wine hard to swallow.

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