An Indian court says Google can be liable for selling rivals a brand’s name

The Delhi High Court held that letting competitors bid on the trademark ‘Hindware’ as an ad keyword is infringement, and that Google’s safe-harbour shield does not cover it.

The business of search advertising rests on a quiet assumption: that a platform can auction off any word, including someone else’s brand name, and treat the legal consequences as the advertiser’s problem. The Delhi High Court has just rejected that assumption.

In a judgment delivered on 22 May, Justice Mini Pushkarna held that Google is itself liable for allowing rivals to bid on the trademark “Hindware” as an advertising keyword.

The court permanently restrained Google LLC and Google India from offering the mark as a keyword and ordered them to pay Hindware Limited, an Indian sanitaryware maker, ₹30 lakh, about $31,600, in damages. The sum is nominal. The reasoning is not.

The dispute is old. Hindware sued after finding that competitors, including the fittings brands Cera and Grohe, had bought “Hindware” and close variants as keywords, so that searches for the brand surfaced sponsored links to its rivals.

Those advertisers settled, leaving Google as the lone contesting defendant and turning a routine trademark spat into a test of how far a platform’s responsibility runs.

Google’s defence was the familiar one: it merely reserves keywords, and any use of a trademark is down to the advertiser who bids. The court was unpersuaded. It found that Google actively suggested trademarked terms through its Keyword Planner tool, ran the auctions that priced them, and earned revenue each time a user clicked a sponsored link the keyword had triggered.

On that basis, Justice Pushkarna held that using a mark as a keyword amounts to using it “in advertising,” even when the word never appears in the ad itself.

The most consequential part concerns safe harbour. Under Section 79 of India’s IT Act, intermediaries are shielded from liability for what users do on their platforms.

The court held that Google forfeits that protection when it algorithmically decides who gets shown and profits from the decision, and that its policy of not investigating trademarked keywords was itself a failure of due diligence. A platform that shapes outcomes, in this reading, is no longer a neutral pipe.

That is the line that gives the ruling its reach. Keyword bidding on a competitor’s brand is standard practice across the ad industry, and the judgment puts both the bidder and the platform on the hook in India.

Lawyers and brand owners welcomed it; the logic, if it holds, is not obviously confined to keywords, and could be pressed against any function where an algorithm actively shapes what users see, from ad targeting to content recommendation to search ranking.

It is a single high-court judgment, in one large market, and Google has the option to appeal, which would test whether the safe-harbour reasoning survives a higher bench.

Even so, the decision lands as regulators worldwide circle the economics of Google’s ad business, from EU antitrust cases to France’s €150m fine over its ad rules. What India has added is a different question: not whether Google’s ad market is fair, but whether it can keep selling words it does not own.