AhHa! BB is really Tim Berners Lee or maybe Al Gore. 

The problem here IMO, is that people see firewall or TCP/IP and immediately think internet. Poser AFAIK has never used the internet to function, apart from the ill fated activation scheme for I think P5. It has and may still try to access the local network to look for ther copies of itself and now apparently uses standard networking protocols for it's own internal purposes. I have a local webserver running on my system. It uses the local address http://127.0.0.1 or http://localhost or http://Diana (the name of the machine) to access web pages hosted locally and has nothing to do with the internet. If you have two or more machines on a local network, they are likely using the same protocol - again completely apart from the internet.

Now there are hints being given that in the future, the internet will be involved in some kind of cloud based content repository and who knows what else - collaboration between users, peer to peer render farms, subscription access to optional features - there are a lot of possibilities.

Given that the standard communications protocols already exist and ensure inter-operability it would have made no sense to write something else. Choosing how to implement the interface is another issue. You can use TCP/IP, HTTP, XML-RPC, SOAP etc. without using a browser control or Flash/Flex. I believe that BB alluded in another post that this was SM's preferred architecture. So yes, IMO they could have written code in Poser to handle those functions. Whether their decision was based on cost, complexity, future plans etc. I don't know. I would be surprised if cross-platform compatibility wasn't one issue. If you want to display rich interactive content on different platforms (PC+Mac), it's easier to use Flash and a browser and let Adobe et al worry about doing the coding than to implement and maintain your own interface twice.

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken