It is not a direct relationship. Are you going to argue that laws and penalties banning alcohol didn't increase violent crime?
Laws and penalties simply provide a method of punishment. If people are willing to risk the penalties or are already criminals they have very little effect especially in areas that are difficult to police effectively.
And U.S. laws and penalties have zero deterrent effect on people in other countries the effect of strong laws against something on the Internet is not especially effective. As a web site on the public Internet is just as reachable from China as it is from Wichita, all you've done is criminalize U.S. activity. This is not necessarily a good thing. For instance:
When the U.S. enacted the ITAR regulations, they categorized strong encryption as a munition and banned its export. The result was that U.S. programmers stopped working on strong encryption. If someone from overseas downloaded your encryption software you could go to jail for 20 years.
For a long time if you wanted strong encryption you had to download it from an overseas system and apply it to your systems here manually.
The result? American's stopped developing encryption technology. The current U.S. encryption standard, AES, was developed outside the U.S.
Hmmm... That’s an interesting point. Are you postulating that the desire to do harmful hacking (to be specific and not indict all hackers) is comparable to alcohol or drug addiction?
At any rate, IF the vast majority of the populace had been willing to support whatever penalties were necessary to make Prohibition effective, it would have been successful. Certainly there are countries in which this has been done, with general success. Prohibition failed in the U.S. because the vast majority of the U.S. populace was not so inclined.
That’s not to say no one would ever get their hands on an alcoholic beverage, given my “IF”. There are always some cracks. (Oh, BTW, I am not a tee-totaler. I am just commenting on your example. )
Now, in the case of the Internet, you are correct: You’d probably have to get some sort of essentially world-wide treaty going (with real penalties for countries unwilling to go along with it) to crack down on harmful hacking. But, I think this problem will eventually become so big, and cost everyone so much money, that it will come to pass. Once it does, you don’t have to find every offender. You find a few, and administer Saudi Arabian style justice. Even that would not end the problem. But it would lessen it.
Then again... Back in my college days, when I was studying Electrical Engineering, I was too doggone busy to get into such trouble. (The story of my life!) Maybe there is an answer there... ?