The other people who suggested using LWP are perfectly correct. If you still want to use sockets, your problem is that you are not sending the request properly to get the page. Try adding:

print $sock "GET /webstats/yyy.htm HTTP/1.0\015\012\015\012";
[download]

before trying to read from the socket*. For more information on the HTTP Spec (versions 1.1 and 1.0), check out W3C's HTTP page.

*This isn't completely portable ;-). If on VMS, replace each \015\012 with \n, and if using EBCDIC, replace each \015\012 with "\r\n".