By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) stock drifted down by 0.7% in premarket trade on Wednesday, after the European Union's top court dismissed its appeal against a $2.8 billion antitrust fine levied by the European Commission.
The European Court of Justice upheld the Commission's 2017 ruling that stated Alphabet's Google unit had discriminated against third-party advertisers in the way it presented results for shopping searches. It's one of three antitrust rulings from the EU that have led to over 8 billion euros ($9.2 billion) in fines so far. The other two rulings affected its Adsense business and its dominance of the Android operating system for mobile devices.
Alphabet has already separated its Google Shopping business operationally from the core search business in response to the ruling.
Alphabet had earlier this week become the third company in history, after Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), to reach a market value of $2 trilllion, having risen 67% since the start of the year thanks to a buoyant advertising market.
It was the only one of the Big Tech megacaps whose third-quarter earnings were received posittively, beating expectations for both revenue and earnings handily, as its core advertising business proved relatively immune to the privacy changes on Apple's operating system that hurt other ad-based platforms.