Europe’s established land-based gaming operators want national governments to do more to protect their entrenched interests, particularly as it applies to unwelcome online gambling competition.

On Monday, Dietmar Hoscher, vice-chairman of the European Casino Association (ECA), gave a speech in Malta in which he urged European legislators, regulators and gaming industry stakeholders to “join forces and stop the provision of illegal online gambling.”

Hoscher, who also serves as a director of Casinos Austria, urged attendees at the 12th Conference of the European Association of the Study of Gambling to press their governments to ramp up “blacklists, IP-blocking and payment-blocking” of online gambling sites operated by (presumably) someone other than Casinos Austria or any other ECA member.

Around the same time that Hoscher was ordering online gambling operators off his lawn, Torsten Meinberg, managing director of the German lottery and pool betting operator association Deutsche Lotto and Totoblock (DLTB), was urging the heads of Germany’s 16 states not to proceed with plans to amend the State Treaty on Gambling to permit online licensing of international competitors.