What you've identified is the looming great conflict of the coming decades. Legacy states presume that the internet regards reality on their terms.

If states want to legislate internet objects, they first need to very clearly explain how they define the objects which they regard as being within their purview.

The state doesn't like to consider anything as beyond their purview.

The idea that the internet transcends material and social realities and that nations are now irrelevant seems like a pretty old-fashioned idea at this point.

Not as old-fashioned as the idea of "legacy states" for sure but perhaps less able to withstand the test of time.

It seems to me to be a temporary artifact of the closed/corporate social slop that has come be to the face of the internet lately.

But in 1,000 years, I'm pretty confident that the internet (whether it consists of AI or humans or both) will revere The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (and The Grateful Dead more generally) and will regard Meta and Tiktok as footnotes.