Hey, thank you for publishing this proposal. All in all, I think the idea is noble, but there is some information missing, along with some more proposal requirements I would like to see when using treasury funds.

In general, I agree with this statement: "There are several problems with existing infrastructure and trends that infrastructure growth is taking will only exacerbate these issues. These are rooted in an infrastructure provider’s desire to provide high quality services at the lowest price which results in an inevitable decision to use public cloud providers." - the use of public clouds should be gradually avoided and higher cost location included in the set to accomplish better geographic decentralisation.

A few comments and questions that come to my mind when reading the proposal:

• what are the requisites for operators to join the programme? how will the curators decide on the best candidates to provide funding for their infra? Furthermore, how do you envision the process for applying to this?
• can we work on a model in which the treasury does not provide 100% of the funding for the hardware, but the operator also has some "skin in the game"? Maybe one criteria for eligibility should be this: the condition for the operator to self-fund part of the setup.
• All in all, the amount requested is super high: i would expect to lower the amounts using shorter milestones to show results on a faster pace. This way, the project can be reviewed regularly for further support or deprecation.
• A big question is: what happens with the validators' rewards? Are programme participants required to share the rewards in some proportion with the treasury? or will the funding for the hardware be with no strings attached? This is an expensive setup for the treasury to fund with no accountability regarding how its used, who owns it, and what happens if the operator stops validating.
• On M3 you mentioned W3F: why is the organisation part of this proposal? I dont think this is suitable.

Thanks for the proposal Tom.

We at Dwellir are one of the infrastructure providers who run our own hardware in co-locations sites.

We see the same challenge as you regarding the centralization around Public Cloud providers. A quick look at the validator distribution on which network they run on, we see how they cluster within the Clouds.

The ecosystem should continue to support different initiatives for decentralization.

If your proposal could be modified so that there will be, as rtti5220 wrote, "skin in the game" for the operators that will be great.

Let the operators of the ecosystem buy the hardware, and then the program can pay a monthly fee to the operators. We want to avoid free-riders, but at the same time help out newcomers get going. Setting the entry barrier right is the challenge.

/Gustav
Dwellir