It's quite likely that their lawyers have concluded that if they do reinstate the account, and some nutjob somewhere claims that they're covering up for actual child abuse, the reputation loss is going to be higher still.

Basically, CSAM is too radioactive for common sense.

Also, in the U.S. there seem to be an extremely large number of people who accuse their political opponents of being child abusers, so that might make sense for Google from a purely strategic perspective.

What's even sadder for us across the pond is that this US oversensitivity to any kind of nudity and desire to censor it for political and religious reasons, is spreading here though tech companies enacting their crazy US policies across the world.

"But a kid seeing a nipple isn't illegal here"

"Doesn't matter, it's illegal in 'Merica, so to simplify things, it's now illegal wherever Google operates "

I guess it's payback for the EU cookies banners. /s

This kind of stuff is one reason why it should be illegal for platforms to censor at will, it should be possible to sue them for censoring stuff they shouldn't be censoring just as it is for not censoring stuff they should be censoring. No matter how much they like to say they are fReEEeE pRiVAte eNTErpRiSes, they provide de-facto public spaces(public as in accessible to the broad public, not as in government-run) and should be treated as such. They shouldn't have the power to be legislative and judiciary of public communication.

> Can someone explain what Google's logic is?

"We are Google. We don't give a fuck."

corporate rigidity and lack of monetary incentive to reinstate the account

Google has a policy that they delete permanently the contents of any account that has been suspended for 30 days or more. They do this to comply with European GDPR regulations (which require they not hold any data they no longer have the users permission to store, nor have ongoing legitimate interest in), and they have written it into their own privacy policies.

Therefore, this account and all the data contained is already gone. The most they could do is allow him to create a new account with the same name, but to my knowledge that isn't supported technically in their systems (too many bugs to be found by re-using unique identifiers).

Changing this would probably be a huuuuge undertaking, since every Google product would have to be modified to expect email addresses might be reused for a new account. And some products are in maintenance/bugfix only mode, so those products would probably have to be sunsetted if the changes were too invasive.

That's why they stand by their decision - they don't currently have the capability to implement any other option.