After years of losses totaling billions of dollars, Walt Disney Co.’s overall streaming business has reached profitability for the first time. Third-quarter results, however, were tempered by weakening demand at the company’s key parks unit.

The Burbank media and entertainment giant reported Wednesday that its streaming business — which includes Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ — took in about $6.4 billion in revenue for its fiscal third quarter, up 15% compared with a year earlier.

The streaming business notched $47 million in operating income, compared with a loss of $512 million a year earlier. During the most recent quarter, ESPN+ helped boost Disney’s streaming business over the profitability hump, at a time when Disney+ and Hulu saw an operating loss of $19 million.

The milestone comes one fiscal quarter earlier than Disney executives had anticipated.

“What we’ve been seeing with streaming is significant success largely driven by the success of our creativity,” chief executive Bob Iger said during a Wednesday morning call with analysts. “We’re bullish about the future of this business.”

Achieving profitability in Disney’s streaming business has been a top priority for Iger, who earlier this year held off activist investor Nelson Peltz in a proxy fight. Among other things, Peltz demanded that Disney show a realistic plan for achieving large margins of profitability in its streaming business. To reach that goal, Iger undertook a wide-ranging cost-cutting effort across the company, which slashed thousands of jobs.

Company executives said product and technology improvements in its streaming services would pay dividends going forward. They mentioned that bundling packages, such as the recent deal Disney reached with Warner Bros. Discovery to offer Disney+, Hulu and Max for one price, has helped reduce subscriber churn, while the company’s early efforts to crack down on password sharing have not faced significant backlash.

Overall, the company generated revenue of $23.1 billion during the fiscal third quarter, up 4% year over year. Earnings, excluding certain items, were $1.39 per share, up from $1.03 a year earlier and higher than analysts’ estimates.

The company’s studios business also contributed to the quarterly results, led by the success of Pixar’s “Inside Out 2.”

Disney’s entertainment division reported revenue of about $10.6 billion, up 4% year over year. Operating income for the segment totaled $1.2 billion, up from $408 million in the previous year. (The interest in “Inside Out 2” also drove viewers to Disney+, as the company said viewers’ desire to watch 2015’s “Inside Out” helped lead to more than 1.3 million sign-ups for the streaming service. Iger said the company is seeing similar trends with the previous “Deadpool” and “Planet of the Apes” movies.)

Revenue for Disney’s sports business, which includes ESPN, increased 5% to about $4.5 billion, though the segment saw operating income of $802 million, down 6%. Domestic ESPN ad revenue rose 17% year over year, but it wasn’t enough to offset the $314-million operating loss from Disney’s Star India business, which saw higher programming and production costs due to the timing of the ICC T20 cricket World Cup.

It was a more muted quarter for the company’s experiences division, which includes its amusement parks and cruise line, as well as merchandise.

The division dominated the company’s financial results in recent fiscal quarters, aided in part by pent-up demand for travel since the pandemic. But for the most recent quarter, the division reported operating income of $2.2 billion, down 3% from last year.

Disney said the decrease in operating income was due to softening consumer demand. Results from the company’s U.S.-based parks decreased “modestly,” though year-over-year attendance was comparable and per-capita spending was “slightly up,” the company said.

The group brought in about $8.4 billion in revenue in the fiscal third quarter, up 2% year over year.

The company expects to see “flat-ish” revenue for its experiences division in the fourth quarter and for several quarters after that, Hugh Johnston, chief financial officer, said on the Wednesday call. Disney cited the Olympics’ effect on attendance at Disneyland Paris, as well as “cyclical softening” in China as factors for fourth-quarter results.

In a major blow to Google, a federal judge on Monday ruled that the tech giant violated antitrust laws by illegally maintaining a monopoly on web searches.

The much-anticipated decision marks a significant victory for federal regulators trying to rein in the power of Big Tech and could send shock waves through the tech world. Other firms, including Apple, Meta and Amazon, also face federal antitrust lawsuits.

“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his opinion.

The ruling did not include a remedy for Google’s conduct.

Kent Walker, president of Google Global Affairs, said in a statement that the company plans to appeal.

“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” he said. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”

Regulators alleged that Google maintained a monopoly on web searches by reaching agreements with browser developers, phone manufacturers and wireless carriers to pre-load their products with the Google search engine as the default.

By agreeing to partner with Google, the companies receive a portion of the advertising revenue Google generates through the search process, the ruling said.

In 2021, Google paid out a total of $26.3 billion in revenue share under its contracts with browser developers Apple and Mozilla, major manufacturers of Android devices such as Samsung and Motorola, and U.S. wireless carriers including AT&T and Verizon, according to the ruling.

That amount was Google’s greatest expense that year, the ruling said. That same year, Google earned more than $146 billion in advertising revenue, according to the ruling.

“These distribution deals have forced Google’s rivals to find other ways to reach users,” the ruling said.

The Mountain View-based subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. has increasingly cornered the market for web searching. In 2009, 80% of U.S. web searches went through Google. By 2020, that figure was nearly 90%, according to the ruling. Almost 95% of mobile searches used Google.

Google’s next closest competitor — Microsoft’s Bing — took up just 6% of web searches, the ruling said.

This dominance of the search market caught the attention of antitrust regulators, and by 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice and multiple state attorneys general had filed two separate lawsuits against the tech giant.

During the course of legal proceedings, dozens of witnesses were deposed, including high-ranking tech executives. The bench trial started in September 2023 and lasted for nine weeks. Closing arguments occurred in May.

It’s not yet clear what the ruling will mean for Google, particularly since the company plans to appeal and there will be further proceedings about potential remedies.

“We’re still in the middle of the game, as opposed to the end of the game,” said Colin Kass, a partner in the litigation department at Proskauer and co-head of the firm’s antitrust group.

But if the ruling stands, it could force Google to revisit how it does deals with outside companies for the opportunity to be the default search engine, said Jef Pearlman, clinical professor of law and director of the intellectual property and technology law clinic at the USC Gould School of Law.

“If it stands, this will limit their current approach,” he said.

The ruling is less likely to have an effect on the other pending tech federal antitrust cases, mostly because the Google case focuses so narrowly on the market for web searches, which is not relevant to the other lawsuits, legal experts said.

But it could serve as a warning for artificial intelligence companies, which are starting to make deals with outside companies to use their technology and could run into similar issues as Google did with its default search engine agreements.

Though the AI market is still nascent, “they will be thinking of this as they pen those deals,” Pearlman said.

It’s nail-biting time on Wall Street.

Stocks had been dropping at worrisome rates for several days, but on Monday things went from concerning to panicky. At one point, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 1,200 points, on a day when equity markets tumbled across the globe. It closed down 1,034 points, or 2.6%.

Technology stocks have been hit particularly hard lately: The Nasdaq composite was, for a moment on Monday, down more than 10% since the middle of last week, entering into what economists euphemistically call “correction” territory.

The sudden pullback has jolted investors and raised questions that go beyond financial markets to questions about the underlying health of the economy.

And even when things level out, the window-rattling downturn threatened to kill the political euphoria that has swept over Democrats since President Biden withdrew and Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the party’s standard-bearer.

So what’s happened and what may be next? Here are first-draft-of-history answers to some of the crucial questions:

What’s causing the current plunge in U.S. stock markets?

Economists point to several factors behind the sell-off. To begin with, tech stocks were overdone, pushed beyond their underlying value by the artificial intelligence craze. Hence the Nasdaq correction. Nvidia, Apple and Intel were among big losers Monday.

And Friday’s jobs report, which showed a sharp slowdown in hiring and unemployment in July, set investors — even those not deep into tech — on edge. That came on the heels of news that jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, increased significantly in the waning days of July.

It hasn’t helped that the Federal Reserve has been reluctant to start cutting interest rates, which have throttled inflation as intended, but also weighed down businesses and consumers.

Then there’s the reverberation from global markets. On Monday, Japan’s once-high-flying stocks took their worst drubbing since Black Monday in 1987. The huge losses were seen, in part, as being a reaction to market declines and growing concerns in the U.S.

“It’s an unfortunate sequence of events that causes selling, selling, selling,” said Christopher Rupkey, chief economist at Fwdbonds, a research house in New York.

How have stock markets in the U.S. performed overall this year?

Even with Monday’s panic-selling, stocks generally are up for the year, many way up.

Both the broader Standard & Poor’s 500 and Nasdaq are still more than 9% higher compared with the start of the year. The Dow is the laggard, up only 2.6% since Jan. 2.

Stocks have benefited from strong corporate earnings; investor excitement over AI’s growth and potential; and the expectation of Fed interest rate cuts, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

“This is still, at this point, a garden-variety correction,” Zandi said of the current turmoil, though he added that the situation warrants careful watching. “Things can take on a life of their own.”

Should I be worried about a recession?

Not yet, maybe never.

The classical definition of a recession is two straight quarters of declining gross domestic product. The latest, second-quarter GDP, after adjusting for inflation, was a strong 2.8%.

Almost every economist agrees that you can’t have a recession without job growth turning negative for some extended period. And the U.S. economy hasn’t come close to that point.

Employers have added jobs every month since January 2021, when the economy began to recover from the pandemic. Most recently, in July, job growth came in below expectations, but at 114,000 new payroll hires, that was still solidly positive.

“I don’t see the underpinnings of an economic downturn,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer and founding partner at Cresset Capital.

Can anything be done to arrest the decline in stocks?

To quell the sell-off, some investors have urged the Fed to cut interest rates now, in a kind of emergency move ahead of the central bank’s next scheduled meeting in mid-September.

Fed officials have taken such steps before, during the pandemic and the Great Recession, for example. But analysts doubt that the policymakers will intervene unless markets keep faltering badly; making an emergency cut could make things worse by frightening people and causing a market meltdown.

“It’s certainly not a hair-on-fire moment,” Zandi said.

What are the risks going forward?

With more people on edge about the economy, further declines in the stock market could erode confidence among businesses and consumers, leading to a pullback in hiring and spending. That would be a psychological development, but economies are not immune to the fears or the hopes of their human components.

Consumer spending, which drives the U.S. economy, has held up very well in recent years, thanks to steady job and wage growth. But there are indications from companies such as McDonald’s and Starbucks that consumers are becoming more cautious.

Higher-income households account for a disproportionately big share of spending, which has been supported by rising gains in home and stock prices. A sharp drop in stocks would have the reverse impact, a so-called negative wealth effect, making richer households more averse to spending, which could lead to a recession.