(Wines&Vines) - —It appears that wine companies may suffer collateral damage in a policy dispute between European agencies and the United States over control of the Internet.

Specifically, European agencies want to loosen the grip that the U.S. nonprofit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has on assigning Internet generic top-level domains (gTLDs) such as .com and .gov.

There have been less than a dozen such TLDs (other than those for countries), but ICANN proposes to create hundreds more, including .wine, .vin and .vino for use by wine interests.

However, regional wine associations in the United States and European wine regions object to the suffixes to Internet addresses unless safeguards are included to prevent misuse of the domains.

“It could be extortion,” noted Rex Stults, head of government relations for the Napa Valley Vintners, one of the regional groups opposing the new suffixes.

He notes that companies might have to reserve not only basic names like Mondavi but variations like MondaviWine.wine, RobertMondavi.wine, MondaviEstates.wine and likely spend heavily to protect their interests.

In addition, unscrupulous operators might reserve names relating to regions like Napa Valley and hijack potential customers to sell them other wines.

U.S. wineries are not alone in their opposition.

“We will pass from 20 domain names to a thousand, and this will pose risks for brands, companies, local authorities,” said Riccardo Ricci Curbastro, president of European Federation of Origin Wines. “We feel that we are witnessing the establishment of a globally organized extortion scheme,” he said in a statement.

Esther Dyson, the famed tech observer, venture investor and founding chair of ICANN, agrees. “I think (and have said elsewhere) that this is basically a protection racket.”