What the Court Actually Held
On May 22, 2026, Justice Mini Pushkarna of the Delhi High Court handed sanitaryware maker Hindware Limited a permanent injunction against Google, closing out litigation that began in 2013, when Hindware discovered rival Cera Sanitaryware (and its web vendor, Omkara Infoweb) bidding on "HINDWARE" as a Google Ads keyword so Cera's listings would surface when consumers searched for Hindware's own brand. Grohe India did the same from October 2014. Cera and Grohe eventually settled; Google fought on and lost.
The court found Google itself — not merely the advertisers who bought the keyword — infringed Hindware's mark under Section 29(6)(d) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, which treats use of a registered mark "on business papers or in advertising" as infringement. Justice Pushkarna held that a mark need not visibly appear in an ad for that use to count: an invisible backend trigger that fires a sponsored listing is itself "use... in advertising." The judgment also rejected Google's safe-harbor defense under Section 79 of the IT Act, finding Google was not a passive conduit — its Keyword Planner Tool actively suggests trademarked terms to bidders, it runs the auction, and it earns revenue on every resulting click. Google was ordered to stop selling "HINDWARE" to rivals and pay Hindware ₹30 lakh (roughly $31,600) in nominal damages.
Google filed a 4,761-page appeal on July 7, arguing the ruling makes India the "sole outlier" among global jurisdictions, with "serious consequences for the digital advertising industry, online consumer choice, and competitive markets." A Division Bench of Justices V. Kameswar Rao and Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora took the matter up on July 10, issued notice, and listed it for final arguments on July 24.
The Case for the Ruling
Hindware's underlying grievance is legitimate. It spent thirteen years — and presumably a great deal more in legal fees than it recovered in damages — establishing that a rival was renting out its brand name to divert its own customers, with Google collecting a fee on every diversion. A platform that builds tools specifically to suggest a competitor's trademark to bidders, runs the auction, and takes a cut is doing more than hosting third-party content; it is an active participant in the transaction that causes the harm. Courts elsewhere have long wrestled with exactly this problem — that treating ad platforms as untouchable intermediaries lets them profit from infringement while advertisers absorb all the legal risk. Section 29(6)(d)'s plain text supports reading "use in advertising" broadly, and the court's finding that Google's role is commercial rather than passive is not obviously wrong.
Where the "Outlier" Claim Holds Up
But Google's comparative claim survives scrutiny better than blanket corporate rhetoric usually does. The CJEU's 2010 ruling in the joined Google France v Louis Vuitton cases (C-236/08 to C-238/08) held the opposite of Delhi's approach on the core question: Google itself does not "use" a trademark by selling it as a keyword, and only the advertiser can be liable — and only if the resulting ad confuses consumers about the origin of the goods. In the US, the Second Circuit's 2009 Rescuecom v Google ruling is often cited as the pro-plaintiff outcome, but it only held that selling keywords is "use in commerce" enough to survive dismissal — it did not find Google liable, and the case was later dropped without any finding against Google at all. Neither jurisdiction has ever ordered Google itself to pay damages for selling a keyword; both channel liability toward the advertiser and condition it on actual consumer confusion.
That is the real distinction the Delhi ruling introduces: strict platform liability, untethered from a confusion inquiry, for the intermediary that runs the auction rather than the party that placed the bid. India's digital ad market, projected to reach roughly $14.6 billion in 2026, runs on the same keyword-auction mechanics everywhere else. A rule that makes the auctioneer strictly liable — rather than assessing whether a given ad actually misled a searcher — creates asymmetric exposure for one company operating a global product under a single set of India-specific rules.
The Proportionate Fix
The editorially sound outcome is not to let Google off the hook, but to align India's standard with the confusion-based test used in the US and EU: hold advertisers accountable when their keyword-triggered ads genuinely mislead consumers about a product's origin, while reserving platform-level liability for cases where Google itself — not merely by selling ad inventory, but through affirmative deception — misleads users. A blanket rule that a registered trademark owner can bar all rivals from ever triggering an ad off their brand name, enforced against the platform rather than the bidder, risks handing incumbents a veto over comparative advertising and search visibility that has nothing to do with consumer confusion. The Division Bench's July 24 hearing is the moment to draw that line — before India's approach hardens into precedent that few other courts, and no other major ad market, currently follow.