My opinion - the IOTA crypto architecture can and will prevent "attacks" such as the one you mention in the article. IOTA is fee less - proof of work is done by each user in a distributed computing model. IOTA is inherently scale-able - the more users making transactions, the higher the network throughput. This is due to the fact that for every transaction a users posts they have to do proof of work on two transactions. This makes IOTA's network transaction rate exponentially scale-able. This also makes it improbable that any single entity or group could control network hash throughput.