The new .bayern TLD will reinforce the unique geographic identity of the businesses and inhabitants of Bavaria, Germany’s second-most populous state.

PunktBayern, the company behind the upcoming new top level geographic domain .bayern, today announced that it has chosen Afilias as its partner for registry and DNS services.

Afilias, a leading global provider of Internet infrastructure services, will also work closely with PunktBayern on its upcoming top level domain (TLD) application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This initiative will be part of ICANN’s planned TLD expansion program, anticipated to start in the latter half of 2011.

PunktBayern—German for “dotBavaria”—was founded in 2006 specifically to bring the .bayern TLD to market. The TLD is designed to reinforce the unique geographic identity of the businesses and inhabitants of Bavaria, the second-most populous state in Germany with 2.5 million residents.

“PunktBayern wanted to work with a company who could provide a reliable registry infrastructure for the launch and growth of the .bayern TLD. We selected Afilias based on its outstanding support for a diverse range of TLDs since 2001 with the launch of .INFO,” said Lothar Kunz, managing director of PunktBayern GmbH & Co. KG. “Thanks to Afilias, PunktBayern will be able to focus on growing the recognition of .bayern in the marketplace since we know that Afilias will be able to successfully handle all the ‘back-end’ services for us.”

Kunz added, “PunktBayern plans to establish the .bayern domain by focusing on websites that will make Bavarian products and services easily available around the world. Down the road, .bayern will also play an important role as a virtual gate to Bavaria, where citizens will intuitively find e-government services.”

Roland LaPlante, Senior Vice President of Afilias, said, “Afilias is proud to have been selected to help bring .bayern to market. Given the unique nature of the Bavarian region, PunktBayern has strong potential to extend this identity on the Internet and provide a superior TLD choice compared to generic TLDs.”

About PunktBayern®
PunktBayern is the company behind the .bayern top level domain for Bavaria, designed to give Bavarians a unique Internet identity. Any Bavarian-based person, company or organization can register .bayern domains once they are commercially available. PunktBayern will also work closely with the government of the State of Bavaria to ensure that .bayern supports the needs of all Bavarians. More information about PunktBayern is available at www.punktbayern.de.