Opening up thousands of new Internet domain possibilities may be good news for some, but companies that make world-famous wine aren't excited.
Fine wine producers in Europe, California and Australia are trying to stop action that will allow domain names including ".wine" and ".vin," The Wall Street Journal reported.
Officials from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers are meeting this week around 2,200 people, who come from government, business, technical organizations and more.
The companies are concerned that inferior counterparts will be able to palm themselves off as the real deal if they use these domain names and call their product wine from Champagne, Burgundy and Napa Valley.
"The importance of protecting winegrowing place names is critical to all winegrowing regions of quality; it is not solely a European issue," Linda Reiff, president of the Napa Valley Vintners, the trade association representing the regions' winemakers wrote in a letter to ICANN, as quoted by WSJ. "Internet users could indeed be deceived into believing that they are buying a genuine product with specific qualities and characteristics, when they are in fact getting an imitation."
French winemakers are troubled due to concerns that the new domains will become free game without any geographical restrictions, Quartz reported. For example, a seller of inferior wine could purchase the "www.burgundy.wine" domain and purportedly could sell its product as Burgundy wine.
"We will pass from 20 domain names to a thousand, and this will pose risks for brands, companies, local authorities," said Riccardo Ricci Curbastro, the president of European Federation of Origin Wines, as quoted by WSJ. "We feel that we are witnessing the establishment of a globally organized extortion scheme," he said in a statement.
The ICANN move to add more domain names has met with resistance from those who worry that Internet URLs will be abused.
After an agreement between ICANN and the U.S. government ends next year, hundreds of web domain names are expected to crop up across the Internet. Some that went live this year are .bike, .clothing, .guru, .holdings, .plumbing, .singles, and .ventures, according to PCMag.com.
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