Internet users outside the United States have been unable to visit President George W Bush's official re-election site due to what net monitoring experts believe may be a deliberate decision to block access.
The internet monitoring firm Netcraft reported that the site has been blocked to browsers sited outside the US since early on Monday morning.
"The official campaign web site for U.S. President George W. Bush appears to be rejecting visitors from outside the United States, while allowing access to requests from US points," Netcraft says on its website.
The company monitors website response times from seven locations, including four within the United States and three in other countries.
"Since Monday morning, requests to GeorgeWBush.com from stations in London, Amsterdam and Sydney, Australia have failed, while the four US monitoring stations show no performance problems," said Netcraft.
Those living outside the US now get an "access denied" message telling them they may not have permission to view the directory or page "using the credentials you supplied". This was the message obtained when ireland.comattempted to access the site today.
Reports say the blocking does not appear to be due to an attack by hackers, but as the result of a policy decision.
Netcraft says that on October 21st, the site, georgewbush.com began using the Akamai content distribution network to manage traffic to the site
Such content distribution networks (CDN) are used by many sites that experience extremely heavy web traffic.
According to Netcraft, excluding non-US requests "could be denying access to the Bush campaign site to some registered voters, including American residents who are living overseas but eligible to vote by absentee ballot".
"Overseas ballots became an issue in the 2000 election, when backers of Bush and the Democratic candidate Al Gore fought for every vote amid legal wrangling over recounts in Florida."