As the French government erupted in anger after being denied .vin and .wine this week, another domain name battle was underway over .eco, with a coalition of environmental groups making a bid to control the name and pre-empt its auction to the highest bidder.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) is due to decide in days whether to grant control of .eco to the coalition, led by Big Room Inc, or allow the sale by auction of the top-level domain, which is a much sought-after property. Three other groups are competing for .eco: two from the domain industry and Planet Dot Eco LLC, which is also claiming environmental credentials.

“High-value endings like .eco are like waterfront real estate,” said Jacob Malthouse, co-founder of Big Room Inc, a Canadian company that rallied some 50 environmental groups to bid for the domain name.

The groups wanted to make sure that as the internet expands its names, they are not priced out of some future combination such as climate.eco.

There was also a fear of the .eco name being used for industry greenwashing, Malthouse said.

“You are talking about names like coal.eco or food.eco being auctioned off to the highest bidder. Every dirty company that needs a bit of spit and polish is going to be first in line to sign up for .eco. It is just going to be a mess,” he said.

The 50-strong coalition behind Big Room spans the realms of climate activism, wildlife conservation, sustainable business, and the United Nations, and includes international organisations such as WWF and Greenpeace as well as thinktanks and grassroots groups from Brazil, India, and China.

The UN Environment Programme and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature have also signed on.

“We believe it is important to have a top-level domain name that is trustworthy,” said Randy Paynter, founder of the Care2 petition site which is supporting the bid. “It would be nice if you knew a top-level domain represented something when you clicked through that site, that you can trust that it is not misrepresenting itself.”

Richard McLellan, who oversees the footprint strategy at WWF, said joint ownership of .eco could strengthen environmental messaging. “The platform itself is an opportunity to create greater unity,” he said.

The environmental groups behind the Big Room bid said they had agreed on a set of guidelines to ensure .eco lives up to the name.

But they still have to convince Icann that their claim to .eco is strong enough to pre-empt an auction.

The groups must show their bid has a “higher purpose”, said Christine Willett, Icann’s vice-president of operations. “It has to be endorsed by the community they purport to represent,” she told the Guardian. “A community-based application was intended to serve as a higher purpose … it’s a broader purpose than just a commercial purpose.”

If Big Room can convince Icann it has the community on its side, “they would get preference. They would get that string over and above the non-community applicants,” Willett said.

It is a tall order. So far, just one contested community bid – for .hotel – has succeeded.

Rival group, Planetdoteco, said its board had decided “commenting to the public, media or anyone else at this moment serves no purpose”.

Kevin Murphy, an industry analyst who covers the domain name business, said it was unlikely the .eco coalition would succeed, mostly because of Icann’s scoring system.

The web regulator set a high bar for defining a community – a key criteria for the .eco bid. Other bids, by taxi drivers and tennis associations, had failed because of the scoring system, he said.

“If it were cricket you might point to a community as being organised cricket, or if it were boxing or movies, you could point to a tightly defined community that would be represented by the string,” he said. “But is there something that can be called an eco community? You might call them environmentalists. You might call them greens. It seems to me a bit tenuous.”

But even if the coalition does not gain control of the .eco domain name, there is still a chance to profit from it. The rules for domain name auctions allow for the losers occasionally to walk away with a pay-off, Murphy said.