LWP::Online attempts to answer, as accurately as it can, one of the nastiest technical questions there is: Am I on the internet? This a problem that had no clean permanent solution, and for which you could just keep writing more and more functionality indefinitely, asymtopically approaching 100% correctness but never reaching it. And so LWP::Online is intended to do as good a job as possible, without having to resort to asking any human questions (who may well get it wrong anyway), and limiting itself to a finite amount of programming work and a reasonable level of memory overhead to load the code.