(Bloomberg) -- The Biden administration should force Verisign Inc. to competitively bid to maintain the registry of websites that end in .com after the company hiked prices 70% in the past decade, antitrust advocates said.

In a pair of letters to the Justice and Commerce Departments dated Thursday, a number of groups advocating aggressive antitrust enforcement urged the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to notify Verisign that it would open up competitive bidding for the .com domain once the company’s contract expires next year.

“VeriSign has continued to raise the price for customers, reaping excessive profits without providing a better product or service,” wrote the groups, which were led by the American Economic Liberties Project. Competitive bidding for the registry would likely lead to lower prices, they said, and allow the administration to reimpose price caps to “stop this cycle of exploitation.”

Verisign, which brought in $1.5 billion in revenue last year, operates the .com domain registry, which is essentially a directory of websites and who owns them. A spokesman for Verisign didn’t respond to a request for comment.

For years, the federal government capped the price Verisign could charge for website registrations at $6, though that increased to $7.85 during the Obama years. The Trump administration removed that cap in 2018, allowing the company to hike its prices as much as 7% most years. The company announced that it will begin charging $10.26 for website registrations starting in September.

The groups also urged the Justice Department’s antitrust enforcers to withdraw guidance from 2018 that allowed the NTIA to eliminate the price caps, citing President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order on competition.

(Updates with Verisign not responding in fourth paragraph.)

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