You have to remember the background for this era. Shockwave (not yet even Adobe), Shockwave Flash was the overwhelming interactive media on the internet. Kids in middle school and high school watched episodes of .flv videos of South park, we played "stick figure skiing" or "stick figure fighting" games, there were stick figure sledding games, all sorts of "multimedia" apps existed inside the "flash" container/spec. Some of them (multiplayer) also had network support of some sort, if only for supporting ads. A big part of flash was that it was not bitmap, it was... scalable vectors, which allowed it to shrink traditionally "large" (500kb+, easily 10 minutes on dialup) spritemap heavy games, down into 45-100kb (less than 7 minute download) packages that could be played on nearly any desktop
SVG had the same base layer functionality but network support would have been a big step towards making an open standard version of Flash. The iPhone was famously one of the last devices to drop support for Flash (due to both wild and regular security holes), and when they did, Flash (the predominant consumer web technology of the early-mid 2000s) finally died. It was a big deal. Had SVG gotten flash-like capability, it could have been a real game changer (although with giant security holes). Security back then was "somebody elses' problem" so while raw sockets seems wholly irresponsible by modern standards, back then it was the norm, partly because less than 10 million people worldwide really had any kind of risk exposure, plus the fact that the internet was still mostly decentralized, AOL was still considered a major force back then. Facebook and others with billions of users didn't exist yet.
SVG had the same base layer functionality but network support would have been a big step towards making an open standard version of Flash. The iPhone was famously one of the last devices to drop support for Flash (due to both wild and regular security holes), and when they did, Flash (the predominant consumer web technology of the early-mid 2000s) finally died. It was a big deal. Had SVG gotten flash-like capability, it could have been a real game changer (although with giant security holes). Security back then was "somebody elses' problem" so while raw sockets seems wholly irresponsible by modern standards, back then it was the norm, partly because less than 10 million people worldwide really had any kind of risk exposure, plus the fact that the internet was still mostly decentralized, AOL was still considered a major force back then. Facebook and others with billions of users didn't exist yet.