If your only goal is reducing incidence/severity of hurt children, at least two arguments still quickly spring to mind:
(1) Removing the buyers has different macroscopic effects from imprisoning the producers. In a world where private circulation is legal but production is not, the expected result is less production (great!), high prices and incentives for the remaining content (uh-oh), and more creative, intelligent, risk-taking, impoverished (whatever differences make taking the new risks worth it) producers. That long tail is had to crack down on because the high incentives will almost certainly lure in some unsavory individuals. It's a lot like the global ivory trade.
(2) The truth of the following matter is murky to me (and as I understand it, to experts as well; I'd love for somebody else to chime in), but there's an argument that exposure to material at best doesn't help the addiction and is likely to make it worse. CSAM is a bit hard to study, but to the extent that it's comparable to other vices, proxies for murder and rape (movies, games, ...) there's some body of evidence that the substitute behaviors strengthen the addiction and make actual offenses more likely, rather than satiating a need and making real-world offenses less frequent (this is a bit different from the video_games->violence argument because the sample is different and small enough that you wouldn't have necessarily expected that deviant behavior to show up in macro-level stats for a society-wide study).
It's probably worth debating that sort of thing to ensure we're actually going to do some good in the world, but IMO it's a lot more damning that the majority of tech-related CSAM laws are unlikely to help in the manner described, are prone to increasing CSAM issues massively in their secondary effects, have significant other negative collateral, and appear only to be introduced as a Trojan horse for less savory motives. Even if stopping distribution is worthwhile (I think it probably is), the proposed laws are at best totally worthless for the stated goals.
(1) Removing the buyers has different macroscopic effects from imprisoning the producers. In a world where private circulation is legal but production is not, the expected result is less production (great!), high prices and incentives for the remaining content (uh-oh), and more creative, intelligent, risk-taking, impoverished (whatever differences make taking the new risks worth it) producers. That long tail is had to crack down on because the high incentives will almost certainly lure in some unsavory individuals. It's a lot like the global ivory trade.
(2) The truth of the following matter is murky to me (and as I understand it, to experts as well; I'd love for somebody else to chime in), but there's an argument that exposure to material at best doesn't help the addiction and is likely to make it worse. CSAM is a bit hard to study, but to the extent that it's comparable to other vices, proxies for murder and rape (movies, games, ...) there's some body of evidence that the substitute behaviors strengthen the addiction and make actual offenses more likely, rather than satiating a need and making real-world offenses less frequent (this is a bit different from the video_games->violence argument because the sample is different and small enough that you wouldn't have necessarily expected that deviant behavior to show up in macro-level stats for a society-wide study).
It's probably worth debating that sort of thing to ensure we're actually going to do some good in the world, but IMO it's a lot more damning that the majority of tech-related CSAM laws are unlikely to help in the manner described, are prone to increasing CSAM issues massively in their secondary effects, have significant other negative collateral, and appear only to be introduced as a Trojan horse for less savory motives. Even if stopping distribution is worthwhile (I think it probably is), the proposed laws are at best totally worthless for the stated goals.