Odd behavior with IO::Socket::SSL and mod_perl 2.0.8

Hello,

I'll try not to make this too convoluted... :)

The latest version of IO::Socket::SSL on CPAN is v2.005 and includes a 
module IO::Socket::SSL::PublicSuffix.  When attempting to use this 
version of IO::Socket::SSL in modperl, we got a strange 500 Internal 
Server error.  Some debugging led to PublicSuffix.pm.  Lines 291-301 of 
that file basically read in data from the __DATA__ section at the end of 
the file, until they hit a particular marker.  The way the code is 
written to do it works fine on the command line, but fails in mod_perl.

I distilled the whole thing down to a trivial registry cgi:

##################################################################
print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";

my $test = _default_data();

print "length of test is " . length($test) . "\n";

# this block here is directly copied from lines 291-301 of PublicSuffix.pm
{
    my $data;
    sub _default_data {
    if ( ! defined $data ) {
        $data = do { local $/; <DATA> };
        $data =~s{^// ===END ICANN DOMAINS.*}{}ms
        or die "cannot find END ICANN DOMAINS";
    }
    return $data;
    }
}

__DATA__

// ===BEGIN ICANN DOMAINS===

edu.ac

// zone : 2013-11-14 Outer Falls, LLC
zone

// ===END ICANN DOMAINS===
// ===BEGIN PRIVATE DOMAINS===

za.org

// ===END PRIVATE DOMAINS===
##################################################################

If you run that cgi on the command line, it correctly prints "length of 
test is 83"; in a mod_perl environment, it yields:

[Fri Nov 21 11:23:28 2014] [error] cannot find END ICANN DOMAINS at 
/usr/local/mysite/www/cgi-bin/test.cgi line 12.\n

My gut-level feeling is that the writers of that code are committing 
some mod-perl sin somewhere.  The line:
   $data = do { local $/; <DATA> };
... yields an empty $data in mod_perl.

The problem is, IO::Socket::SSL is used by LWP::UserAgent, which is 
probably used by a ton of mod-perl scripts out there. 

My questions, then, are:

1) can you fine folk reproduce this?
2) what would be the best way to address it?

Thanks!
Michael