In a move that will surely shock absolutely no one, the Federal Trade Commission and Zillow have announced a settlement to end the antitrust case over that 2025 "partnership" between Zillow and Redfin. You remember, the one where Zillow agreed to pay Redfin to syndicate its listings, while Redfin agreed to drop its own advertising contracts and promise not to compete with Zillow for multifamily listings. Because nothing says "free market" like paying your competitor to stop competing.

The FTC's proposed settlement is a bit of a compromise: Redfin can keep syndicating rental listings from Zillow, but now it's "unencumbered by the anticompetitive restraints" from the original deal. In other words, they can keep playing together, but the handcuffs are off. Also, Redfin has to restart its own rental listings advertising business, which it had conveniently wound down as part of the whole "partnership" thing.

Daniel Guarnera, the FTC's director of the Bureau of Competition, put a positive spin on it, saying the deal "delivers better, quicker, more certain results for both renters and property management companies than we would have been able to achieve after prevailing at trial." Which is a fancy way of saying they avoided a long, expensive court battle and just settled for something that looks good on paper.

And the state attorneys general of Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Washington also signed off on the proposed settlement, because when you're taking down big bad tech, you want a whole gang of regulators.

This settlement follows a trend from the Trump administration of settling high-profile cases of companies behaving badly, like the Live Nation-Ticketmaster case and the one against Realpage. Because why go to trial when you can just settle and move on to the next thing?