Do what everyone else here suggests (install LWP::Simple locally -- you can do it without root permissions it's just tedious) and use this only as a last resort. No warranties are implied. If you ask followup questions on how to use it I'll disavow all knowledge of you and label you a pest. :)

But it will fetch web pages using only the base installation of Perl.

use IO::Socket;
use strict;
use warnings;

my $sock=new IO::Socket::INET( PeerAddr => 'www.foo.org',
                PeerPort => 80,
                Proto => 'tcp',
                Type   => SOCK_STREAM);
die "No socket" unless $sock;
print $sock "GET http://www.foo.org 1.0\n\n";
my $answer=join('', <$sock>);
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