The European Gaming and Betting Association (EGBA) has mounted a legal challenge of Norway’s ban on payment processing for unauthorized online gambling operators.

Over the past year or so, Norway has been clamping down on internationally licensed online gambling operators that compete with the state-run Norsk Tipping and Norsk Rikstoto monopolies. These efforts culminated last month with the government submitting its new payment-blocking plans to the European Commission for approval.

In January, the EGBA asked Norway’s privacy watchdogs to investigate whether the government’s war on payment processing had broken the law by inappropriately collecting scads of data unrelated to the probe.

This week, Norwegian media revealed that the EGBA had also filed a lawsuit in Oslo District Court challenging the government’s May 2017 ban on banks processing payments on behalf of international gambling sites. The EGBA maintains that the ban violates European Union rules on the free movement of goods and services among EU member states.