Hey here is a simple idea... Why not do a toll? You know something simple that they do with trucks. For what I hate about this tax is what happens when you are outside of the country?

...involved

They could make a note of mileage leaving and re-entering the UK.
Penalty for misplacing the documents would be paying for all the miles.
Or keep it in a database for tax purposes.

Dog-whistle for "vagina"

But my dictator can beat up your dictator!

It will take a really annoying or long outage before people notice they've been screwed by Big Money.

It's hard to know what industry or company Xi is subsidizing, as their system is not transparent.

Give me 5 million and I'd do it, I confess.

Lots of "cute" answers I see. More seriously, the FAA is involved because it involved a flying thing. FAA regulations are designed for flying stuff, and wants a high level of safety.

If a self-driving Fedex truck did what you described, the DOT would likely become involved.

It's probably overkill in most people's homes. However, it may be more valuable in a commercial setting, such as a convention center or hospital. Cutting down on the crud even by a small fraction could be worth quite a bit.

But "95% of international traffic" is not the same as "95% of traffic". You are slicing the wrong pie, Happy Thanksgiving!

That's the problem: they are not a web. The original idea of the internet was to have a web of connections so that a few cables or nodes going bad wouldn't stop data movement, it would route around the bad spots via going through adjacent parts of the web. Seems we have to return to the original vision.

Technically they usually route around damaged sea cables via a larger scale redundancy, such as through another continent, but the webbiness needs to be per sea based on the rate of damage so far.