Can governance principles and business models of digital internet be translated to physical internet?

Abstract

The Physical Internet (PI) is envisaged as a new approach to cooperation in logistics, aimed to increase efficiency and reduce impact through increased interoperability, inspired by how data is transferred via the Digital Internet (DI). Therefore, many of the elements of the Physical Internet network can be translated to their Digital Internet counterparts. Most of the research until now has focused on standardisation of packaging or the digitalizing of different documents exchanged between logistic partners. With regards to governance and business models in the Physical Internet network the current research is relatively limited. As the concept of Physical Internet was inspired by the Digital Internet, it makes sense to look at the concepts applied there and see if and how they can be translated to the Physical Internet. As a proof of concept, this paper will show that some of these concepts are indeed transferable and could be of importance for the future development of PI. To that end, the paper investigates an important governance issue: Net Neutrality and two well-known business models the auction and the subscription model.