It doesn't seem to block this, when ran from the command line:

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;

public class test
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        try
        {
            URL url = new URL("http://www.google.com/");
            HttpURLConnection conn = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
            conn.connect();
            BufferedReader text = new BufferedReader(new
InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
            while ( text.ready() )
            {
                System.out.println(text.readLine());
            }
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
        }
    }
}

I also changed www.google.com in the code I initially posted and the
only difference that made was that no splash screen was shown...

The Google home page isn't, but a search URL is (e.g.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Java).

It can, however, easily be circumvented by supplying a "User-Agent"
request header with the UA string of one of the major browsers as its value.

import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;

public class GoogleAccess {

    private static final String USER_AGENT
            = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;
rv:1.8.0.6) "
            + "Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6";

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        URL url = new URL("http://www.google.com/search?q=Java");
        HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection)
url.openConnection();
        connection.addRequestProperty("User-Agent", USER_AGENT);

        String contentType = connection.getContentType();
        String contentEncoding = connection.getContentEncoding();
        int responseCode = connection.getResponseCode();
        System.out.println("responseCode=" + responseCode + ";
contentType="
                + contentType + "; contentEncoding=" + contentEncoding);

        InputStreamReader reader = new InputStreamReader(connection
                .getInputStream(), contentEncoding == null ? "ISO-8859-1"
                : contentEncoding);
        int ch;
        while ((ch = reader.read()) != -1) {
            System.out.print((char) ch);
        }
        reader.close();
        connection.disconnect();
    }
}

I just uploaded it to a webserver and changed the URL to that server
and it worked just fine.  I guess that was indeed the problem - thanks!

That said...  *.html files using JavaScript's XmlHttpRequest object can
access pages on any domain if the *.html file is being ran off of the
local filesystem (as opposed to from a domain / ip address).  I guess
there is no such policy for Java apps?  ie. unlike XmlHttpRequest,
applets being ran from c:\some\dir are still subject to that policy?