I did not say “no need”. I said “less need”. Or are you going to argue that laws and penalties do not reduce crime / have no deterrent effect?
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.