In a decision with significant implications for how India regulates keyword-based digital advertising, the Delhi High Court held Google liable for trademark infringement — and imposed a ₹30 lakh fine — over a competitor's use of the registered mark 'HINDWARE' as a bid keyword within Google's AdWords advertising programme, a practice that allowed the rival's ads to surface prominently against searches for the Hindware brand name itself.
The Court's most consequential move was rejecting Google's 'intermediary' defence under the Information Technology Act, 2000 — the argument that platforms merely facilitating keyword bidding between advertisers are neutral conduits shielded from liability for how those keywords are actually used. The Court instead held that Google's active role in selling and enabling the use of a registered trademark as a bid keyword, in circumstances likely to cause consumer confusion, took it outside the safe harbour and into direct infringement territory.
Indian courts have grappled with the keyword-advertising question for well over a decade, generally showing more willingness than several Western jurisdictions to find infringement where a rival's trademark is used as a bid keyword, as opposed to treating it purely as an internal, invisible signal to the search engine's ad-ranking algorithm that carries no independent trademark significance. What sharpens this ruling considerably is the direct finding against the platform itself, rather than only the advertiser who purchased the keyword — intermediary safe-harbour protection under Section 79 of the IT Act has historically been a significant shield for platforms in India across many contexts, and a ruling finding it inapplicable to an ad platform's active facilitation of keyword-based trademark use is a meaningful narrowing of that shield in this specific context.
For brand owners, the ruling substantially strengthens the enforcement toolkit against 'keyword squatting' by competitors in search advertising — a practice that has been notoriously difficult to police given ad platforms' historical reluctance to restrict keyword bidding on trademarked terms. For platforms and advertisers alike, it signals that Indian courts are increasingly unwilling to treat digital advertising intermediaries as automatically insulated from trademark liability simply because the infringing use occurs within an automated bidding system rather than through direct content placement. Brand owners with a history of keyword-squatting complaints should consider building a documented pattern of such incidents — including screenshots and search result evidence — since a track record of the practice, rather than a single isolated instance, will likely strengthen both platform-directed and advertiser-directed enforcement action going forward.