First thing I did. It made no difference. It looks as if the server is returning something, but just not the json response. THe perl code seems fine..well no syntax error anyway. I tried to get it to print out a log file in the cgi-bin directory, but there are probably no write permissions for that dir. Thinking it's a directory issue..just dunno. For such a simple thing...can't believe there are so little examples out there.

See json return value and employ the debugging checklists

The public_html/ in public_html/cgi-bin seems unusual