The business news service of Agence-France Presse (AFX) is reporting through Forbes.com this afternoon that Google's new Chinese Web portal, google.cn, was not accessible to ISP customers in Shanghai and Beijing. The reason, sources in Shanghai believe, is that the Chinese government itself may be blocking access to the service.

Tests on a Shanghai-based trace-route server, located at http://www.linkwan.com/vr2/, indicated that the site was being blocked at the government-operated backbone server. The analysis from the trace route said 'IP packets are being lost past network CHINANET backbone network at hop 4.'

Google's new service was launched only last week, in the midst of a public uproar over the company's agreement with the Chinese government to comply with local filtering requirements. But recent demonstrations revealed that retrieved items are only filtered when the items being searched for are spelled correctly - that is, using Roman letters.

(AFX News Limited via Forbes.com)