What the court actually held
On May 22, 2026, Justice Mini Pushkarna of the Delhi High Court permanently restrained Google LLC and Google India from selling the trademark "HINDWARE" as a Google Ads keyword, awarding sanitaryware maker Hindware Limited roughly ₹30 lakh (~$31,600) in damages. The court held that even an invisible, backend keyword constitutes "use in advertising" under Section 29(6)(d) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, and rejected Google's claim to safe-harbour protection as a passive intermediary under Section 79 of the IT Act. Justice Pushkarna's reasoning was blunt: "Google has attempted to sell something that it simply does not own."
Google appealed on July 7, 2026, in a 4,761-page filing not yet public. A Division Bench of Justices V. Kameswar Rao and Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora issued notice and set final hearing for July 24. Google's core arguments, per documents reviewed by Reuters: a keyword is "merely used as an internal and backend trigger to display an ad"; the ruling would hand trademark owners "a monopoly over advertising space to the detriment of consumers" who often search a brand name precisely to compare it against rivals; and the decision makes India the "sole outlier" among major jurisdictions, with knock-on effects for the digital-advertising model globally.
Steelmanning the ruling
The strongest case for Justice Pushkarna's approach isn't hard to make. Hindware's grievance dates back over a decade — the company says it first found competitors bidding on its name through Google AdWords years before litigation concluded — and in that time Google's Keyword Planner actively suggested "Hindware" to rival advertisers as a way to capture Hindware's own search traffic, a practice from which Google profits directly through auction revenue. Indian founders have amplified the complaint: Zerodha's Nithin Kamath and Zoho's Sridhar Vembu have both said they're effectively forced to bid on their own company names just to appear above sponsored rivals. For a coined, distinctive mark like "Hindware," the confusion risk to an average searcher is real, and a platform that both designs the auction and profits from it is not obviously a neutral bystander. That is a legitimate consumer-protection and property-rights concern, not manufactured outrage.
Why "sole outlier" isn't just posturing
The steelman doesn't answer why nearly every comparable court has landed on a narrower rule. The CJEU's 2010 Google France v. Louis Vuitton judgment (Joined Cases C-236/08 to C-238/08) held that a search engine does not itself "use" a trademark merely by letting advertisers bid on it; liability instead turns on whether the resulting ad lets an average consumer tell whose goods they're looking at. The Second Circuit's 2009 Rescuecom v. Google decision similarly found keyword sales to be a "use in commerce" sufficient to open the door to a claim — but US courts since have overwhelmingly required proof of actual confusion under multi-factor tests before finding infringement, not treated the keyword sale itself as dispositive.
Critically, India already had its own version of that confusion-based framework. In Google LLC v. DRS Logistics (Delhi HC Division Bench, August 10, 2023), the same court found Google was not a passive intermediary and could lose Section 79 protection — but it also made clear that liability requires proof of actual confusion, dilution, or unfair advantage, not automatic exposure for permitting a keyword bid. Google's appeal argues the Hindware verdict "diverges from established legal precedents in India" by, in effect, collapsing that multi-factor inquiry into something closer to a per-se rule for coined marks — a claim senior advocate Abhishek Singhvi framed to the Division Bench as inconsistent "with earlier judicial precedents as well as internationally accepted practices governing online advertising."
The case for restraint
This is where the pro-innovation case bites. A confusion-based standard — the one used by the CJEU, by US courts after Rescuecom, and by Delhi's own 2023 Division Bench — lets brand owners sue when an ad is actually deceptive while preserving comparative advertising that benefits consumers and, disproportionately, smaller Indian advertisers who rely on keyword bidding to compete against entrenched incumbents. A per-se rule that punishes the platform for the keyword sale itself, independent of whether any consumer was actually misled, doesn't just constrain Google — it raises the cost and legal risk of running any competitive search-ad auction in India, which large platforms can absorb more easily than the next generation of Indian D2C brands trying to out-market an incumbent.
India is entitled to set its own trademark policy, and a decade-old grievance deserves a hearing on the merits, not deference to Google's convenience. But if the Division Bench affirms a standard genuinely inconsistent with its own 2023 precedent and with the confusion-based approach used everywhere else litigated, the result is regulatory unpredictability that ultimately taxes Indian advertisers and consumers more than it protects them. July 24 will show whether the Division Bench treats Hindware as a fact-specific case of a coined mark and clear confusion, or lets it stand as a broader per-se rule — the difference will shape how every trademark holder in India thinks about suing over search ads next.
The Division Bench's task on July 24 isn't to referee Google versus Hindware — it's to say whether India's keyword-ad liability rule will track the confusion-based standard the same court set in 2023, or break from it.