I know from experience this doesn't scale into the hundreds of thousands of customers and can only imagine the big ass eyeball network's scalability issues...
Hear hear...
Scaling process and procedures is often as hard or harder than scaling technical things...
It's true. But the big networks hire people who understand scaling issues and know how to make things work. It's not up to us to solve their scaling problem. If you can define a mechanism that will work on smaller networks to achieve a goal, and if that goal is worthwhile achieving, the the big networks will get their scalability networks to scale it up. There is a similar problem in chemicals where researchers create new compounds in the laboratory and then hand the details over to scaling experts who know how to change the process to work on the scale of a factory. And it's not unusual to see chemical factories that are acres in size.
The same thing happens with things like abuse -- it is easy to deal with abuse on a small scale. It is somewhat harder on a medium scale and harder still on a large scale -- the progression from small to medium to large is close to linear. At some point though the difficulty suddenly hockey-sticks and becomes distinctly non-trivial -- this doesn't mean that it is impossible, nor that you should give up, but rather that a different approach is needed. Understanding this is harder than understanding why you cannot grow your network just by buying more X.
Yes this is true. But the people who find different approaches need to see how the smaller networks solve a problem. Their skill is not in finding solutions to abuse, but in figuring out how to restructure an abuse solution to work on a huge scale. --Michael Dillon