ISPs and hosting providers can and do take abusive accounts offline if necessary.
Routing means that endpoints can usually be identified with reasonable accuracy.
In the early days, access was through a very small number (single digits, double, a few dozens, a few hundreds) of organisations, mostly US-based research universities. When I first had access to the ARPANET / Internet, if I was abusing resources, I got an email, or visit, from the campus systems admin.
A substantial portion of present-day ISP and datacentre operations is geared at abuse detection and mitigation, both ingress and egress.[1]
Unmanaged mesh ... seems to present a much greater problem here and the entire question is simply hand-waved away. As you're doing here.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Much of this information is informal, but as a recent high-level overview (2017) see: https://abusix.com/resources/isp/what-security-should-an-isp...
Routing means that endpoints can usually be identified with reasonable accuracy.
In the early days, access was through a very small number (single digits, double, a few dozens, a few hundreds) of organisations, mostly US-based research universities. When I first had access to the ARPANET / Internet, if I was abusing resources, I got an email, or visit, from the campus systems admin.
A substantial portion of present-day ISP and datacentre operations is geared at abuse detection and mitigation, both ingress and egress.[1]
Unmanaged mesh ... seems to present a much greater problem here and the entire question is simply hand-waved away. As you're doing here.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Much of this information is informal, but as a recent high-level overview (2017) see: https://abusix.com/resources/isp/what-security-should-an-isp...