Yes. First of all you must have a server. Your program needs the client end programmed into it. The client end must communicate with the server end. Also your program will need to bypass the firewall (not sure how to implement this as I tried multiplayer programming before) or there will be no communication between the client and server. Otherwise your program is stuck only able to run through 127.0.0.1 And you can do this with either the Winsock object, Winsock API's, or even DirectPlay which is part of DirectX. OpenGL also has a 3rd party version but I forgot the name. And you can code your project to not run unless its up to date.

Just dont be like Apple's iTunes. The updates are so annoying I stopped updating altogether.