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The U.S. Department of Defense is setting up a working group to focus on climate change.

The new group will be led by Joe Bryan, who was appointed as a Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense focused on climate earlier this year.

The move is one of several steps that the Biden administration has taken to push an agenda that looks to address the dangers posed by global climate change.

Bryan, who previously served as Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy for Energy under the Obama administration, will oversee a group intended to coordinate the Department’s responses to Biden’s recent executive order and subsequent climate and energy-related directives and track implementation of climate and energy-related actions and progress, according to a statement.

The Department of Defense controls the purse strings for hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending and is a huge consumer of electricity, oil and gas, and industrial materials. Any steps it takes to improve the efficiency of its supply chain, reduce the emissions profile of its fleet of vehicles, and use renewable energy to power operations could make a huge contribution to the commercialization of renewable and sustainable technologies and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

The Pentagon is already including security implications of climate change in its risk analyses, strategy development and planning guidance, according to the statement, and is including those risk analyses in its intallation planning, modeling, simulation and war gaming, and the National Defense Strategy.

“Whether it is increasing platform efficiency to improve freedom of action in contested logistics environments, or deploying new energy solutions to strengthen resilience of key capabilities at installations, our mission objectives are well aligned with our climate goals,” wrote Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in a statement. “The Department will leverage that alignment to modernize the force, strengthen our supply chains, identify opportunities to work closely with allies and partners, and compete with China for the energy technologies that are essential to our future success.”

Facebook has challenged the FTC’s antitrust case against it using a standard playbook that questions the agency’s arguably expansive approach to defining monopolies. But the old arguments of “we’re not a monopoly because we never raised prices” and “how can it be anticompetitive if we never allowed competition” may soon be challenged by new doctrine and the new administration.

In a document filed today which you can read at the bottom of this post, Facebook lays out its case with a tone of aggrieved pathos:

By a one-vote margin, in the fraught environment of relentless criticism of Facebook for matters entirely unrelated to antitrust concerns, the agency decided to bring a case against Facebook that ignores its own prior decisions, controlling precedent, and the limits of its statutory authority.

Yes, Facebook is the victim here, and don’t you forget it. (Incidentally, the FTC, like the FCC, is designed to split 3:2 along party lines, so the “one vote margin” is what one sees for many important measures.)

But after the requisite crying comes the reluctant explanation that the FTC doesn’t know its own business. The suit against Facebook, the company argues, should be spiked by the judge because it fails along three lines.

First, the FTC does not “allege a plausible relevant market.” After all, to have a monopoly, one must have a market over which to exert that monopoly. And the FTC, Facebook argues, has not done so, alleging only a nebulous “personal social networking” market, and “no court has ever held that such a free goods market exists for antitrust purposes,” and the FTC ignores the “relentlessly competitive” advertising market that actually makes the company money.

Ultimately, the FTC’s efforts to structure a crabbed ‘use’ market for a free service in which it can claim a large Facebook ‘share’ are artificial and incoherent.

The implication here is not just that the FTC has failed to define the social media market (and Facebook won’t do so itself), but that such a market may not even exist because social media is free and the money is made by a different market. This is a variation on a standard big tech argument that amounts to “because we do not fall under any of the existing categories, we are effectively unregulated.” After all you cannot regulate a social media company by its advertising practices or vice versa (though they may be intertwined in some ways, they are distinct businesses in others).

Thusly Facebook attempts, like many before it, to squeeze between the cracks in the regulatory framework.

This continues with the second argument, which says that the FTC “cannot establish that Facebook has increased prices or restricted output because the agency acknowledges that Facebook’s products are offered for free and in unlimited quantities.”

The argument is literally that if the product is free to the consumer, it is by definition not possible for the provider to have a monopoly. When the FTC argues that Facebook controls 60 percent of the social media market (which of course doesn’t exist anyway), what does that even mean? 60 percent of zero dollars, or 100 percent, or 20 percent, is still zero.

The third argument is that the behaviors the FTC singles out — purchasing up-and-coming competitors for enormous sums and nipping others in the bud by restricting its own platform and data — are not only perfectly legal but that the agency has no standing to challenge them, having given its blessing before and having no specific illegal activity to point to at present.

Of course the FTC revisits mergers and acquisitions all the time, and there’s precedent for unraveling them long afterwards if, for instance, new information comes to light that was not available during the review process.

“Facebook acquired a small photo-sharing service in 2012, Instagram… after that acquisition was reviewed and cleared by the FTC in a unanimous 5-0 vote,” the company argues. Leaving aside the absurd characterization of the billion-dollar purchase as “small,” leaks and disclosures of internal conversations contemporary with the acquisition have cast it in a completely new light. Facebook, then far less secure than it is today, was spooked and worried that Instagram may eat its lunch, and it was better to buy than compete.

The FTC addresses this and indeed many of the other points Facebook raises in a FAQ it posted around the time of the original filing.

Now, some of these arguments may have seemed a little strange to you. Why should it matter if a market has money from consumers being exchanged if there is value exchanged elsewhere contingent on those users’ engagement with the service, for instance? And how can the depredations of a company in the context of a free product that invades privacy (and has faced enormous fines for doing so) be judged by its actions in an adjacent market, like advertising?

The simple truth is that antitrust law has been stuck in a rut for decades, weighed down by doctrine that states that markets are defined by the price of a product and whether a company can increase it arbitrarily. A steel manufacturer that absorbs its competitors by undercutting them and then later raises prices when it is the only option is a simple example and the type that antitrust laws were created to combat.

If that seems needlessly simplistic, well, it’s more complicated in practice and has been effective in many circumstances — but the last 30 years have shown it to be inadequate to address the more complex multi-business domains of the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook (to say nothing of TechCrunch parent company Verizon, which is a whole other matter).

The ascendance of Amazon is one of the best examples of the failure of antitrust doctrine, and resulted in a breakthrough paper called “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” which pilloried these outdated ideas and showed how network effects led to subtler but no less effective anticompetitive practices. Establishment voices decried it as naive and overreaching, and progressive voices lauded it as the next wave of antitrust philosophy.

It seems that the latter camp may win out, as the author of this controversial paper, Lina Khan, has just been nominated for the vacant 5th Commissioner position at the FTC.

Whether or not she is confirmed (she will face fierce opposition, no doubt, as an outsider plainly opposed to the status quo), her nomination validates her view as an important one. With Khan and her allies in charge at the FTC and elsewhere, the decades-old assumptions that Facebook relies on for its pro forma rejection of the FTC lawsuit may be challenged.

That may not matter for the present lawsuit, which is unlikely to be subject to said rules given its rather retrospective character, but the gloves will be off for the next round — and make no mistake, there will be a next round.

Federal Trade Commission v Facebook Inc Dcdce-20-03590 0056.1 by TechCrunch on Scribd

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Twitter says it’s running a test with a small subset of iOS and Android users to “give people an accurate preview” of what an image will look like without the trial and error that process involves now. As it stands now, the platform automatically crops images to make them display in a more condensed way in the timeline, where users often scroll through without clicking on an image preview. But that approach has created some problems.

The biggest one, historically, is that Twitter’s algorithm that decides which part of an image gets the focus was demonstrated to have baked-in racial bias. The algorithm prioritized white faces over Black ones in its image preview, even cropping out the former president of the United States in one person’s tests.

Twitter’s automatic image handling is also hassle for photographers and artists, who generally prefer to have total control over how an image is presented. If the crop is off, that small misfire can be the difference between a photo attracting a ton of attention or getting ignored outright. It also ruins narrative tweets, as Twitter notes in its example of the tweet about a dog who is conspicuously absent from one of its crops.

It sounds like Twitter is also trying out showing more full images in the timeline. In tweets, Twitter’s Chief Design Officer Dantley Davis said that anyone testing the new image cropping system will find that most single image tweets in normal aspect ratios won’t get a crop at all, though super wide or super tall images will get a crop weighted around the center.

For photographers (present company included) tired of toggling between Instagram’s preference for portrait-oriented images and Twitter’s insistence on landscape crops, that’s good news too. As you can see in the sample image, the change could actually make Twitter a richer visual platform. That would likely mean more scrolling past images that take up multiple tweets worth of vertical space, but we’d be happy to trade the time spent clicking through images for a prettier Twitter timeline.

This morning Arist, a startup that sells software allowing other organizations to offer SMS-based training to staff, announced that it has extended its seed round to $3.9 million after adding $2 million to its prior raise.

TechCrunch has covered the company modestly before this seed-extension, noting that it was part of the CRV-backed Liftoff List, and reporting on some of its business details when it took part in a recent Y Combinator demo day.

Something that stood out in our notes on the company when it presented at the accelerator’s graduation event was its economics, with our piece noting that the startup “already [has] several big ticket clients and [says it] will soon be profitable.” Profitable is just not a word TechCrunch hears often when it comes to early-stage, high-growth companies.

So, when the company picked up more capital, we picked up the phone. TechCrunch spoke with the company’s founding team, including Maxine Anderson, the company’s current COO; Ryan Laverty, its president; and Michael Ioffe, its CEO, about its latest round.

According to the trio, Arist raised its initial $1.9 million around the time it left Y Combinator, a round that was led by Craft Ventures at a $15 million valuation. Following that early investment, the company’s business with large clients performed well, leading to it closing $2 million more last December. The founders said that the new funds were raised at a higher price-point than its previous seed tranche.

The second deal was led by Global Founders Capital.

The company’s enterprise adoption makes sense, as all large companies have regular training requirements for their workers; and as anyone who has worked for a megacorp knows, current training, while improved in recent years, is far from perfect. Arist is a bet that lots of corporate training — and the training that emanates from governments, nonprofits and the like — can be sliced into small pieces and ingested via text-message.

For that the company charges around $1,000 per month, minimum.

Arist did catch something of a COVID wave, with its founding team telling TechCrunch that pitching its service to large companies got easier after the pandemic hit. Many concerns better realized how busy their staff was when they moved to working from home, the trio explained, and with some folks suffering from limited internet connectivity, text-based training helped pick up slack.

We were also curious about how the startup onboards customers to the somewhat new text-based learning world; is there a steep learning curve to be managed? As it turns out, the startup helps new customers build their first course. And, in response to our question about the expense of that effort, the Arist crew said that they use freelancers for the task, keeping costs low.

Recently Arist has expanded its engineering staff, and plans to scale from around 11 people today to around 30 by the end of the year. And while Anderson, Laverty and Ioffe are based in Boston, they are hiring remotely. The startup serves global customers via a WhatsApp integration. So Arist should be able to scale its staff and customer base around the world effectively from birth. (This is the new normal, we reckon.)

What’s ahead? Arist wants to grow its revenues by 5x to 10x by the end of the year, hire, and might share if it wants to raise more capital around the end of the year.

Oh, and it partners with Twilio to some degree, though the group was coy on just what sort of discounts it may receive; the founding team merely noted that they liked the SMS giant and deferred further commentary.

All told, Arist is what we look for in an early-stage startup in terms of growth, vision and potential market scale — the startup thinks that 80% of training should be via SMS or Slack and Teams, the latter two of which are a hint about its product direction. But Arist feels a bit more mature financially than some of its peers, perhaps due to its price point. Regardless, we’ll check back in at the mid-point of the year and see how growth is ticking along at the company.