Launch a small website and commit a felony in 7 states and 13 countries.
I wouldn't have known about the Mississippi bill unless I'd read this. How are we have to know?
You don’t need to know all the laws of Mississippi to serve such customer, or any laws from anywhere else other than Italy.
And if you don't do business in the US there is only so much the US can do. Most importantly it can ask ISPs in the US to block your site. As they do for copyright infringement routinely.
We have all accepted that our countries block copyright violations originating from outside their jurisdiction.
But of course this is a disaster for the free internet. While copyright laws are relatively uniform world wide, so if you respect it locally you're probably mostly fine everywhere, incoming regulation like age verification and limits on social media use, or harassment stuff, is anything but uniform.
To some degree this is also maybe more shocking to people in the US, as the US norms have de facto been the internets norms so far. It is, in any case, not entirely new:
"When Germany came after BME for "endangering the youth" and demanded that I make changes to the site to comply with German law, my response was to simply not visit Germany again (and I'm a German citizen). When the US started to pressure us, we moved all of our servers and presence out of the country and backed off on plans to live in the US. No changes were ever made to the site, and no images were ever removed — if anything, the pressure made me push those areas even more."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMEzine
How do we deal with the fact that we don't have a global mechanism for agreeing (socially and legally) on necessary regulations, whilemaintaining the social good that is a truly global internet?
With the internet it's a lot less clear cut. The user is requesting data from Italy, maybe, but is located in another jurisdiction. Add Cloudflare and the data might even be served from the US by a US company you asked to serve your illegal data.
It's becoming a shit show and is breaking up the global internet.
They can order overflights to land to arrest you, if they so desire. They can also block you from the more-or-less all legitimate commerce globally with sanctions. And if they really don't like you, they can kill you without due process.
All of which the US has done to undesirables over the years, and can do again without any controls or checks or balances, to anyone globally.
The current legal reality is a shitshow but I don't think that's inherent to the situation itself. gTLDs and foreign hosting services certainly complicate things, but then so does choosing to (physically) import supplies from abroad. I'm not convinced there's a real issue there at least in theory.
I think that a single "common carrier" type treaty unambiguously placing all burden on the speaker and absolving any liability arising from jurisdictional differences would likely fix 90% of the current issues. If I visit a foreign run site and lie about my country of residence in order to access material that isn't legal where I reside the only liable party in that scenario should be me.
Except that in this case it's more like applying state sales taxes to online purchases. That has been a thing for years at this point.