Online Travel startup, MakeMyTrip has sued its smaller rival startup EaseMyTrip at Delhi High Court regarding the trademark violations with Google made a party to it.
The accusation is regarding buying ad word from Google for a keyword ‘makemytrip’ on its search engine. This means that anyone who is searching for MakeMyTrip might end up showing the results with EaseMyTrip pages on the top. Surprisingly, this is the first time where Google has been made a party to a legal suit by an e-commerce platform in India.
Earlier this month, online travel platform has taken the issue to the government in a meeting with the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade.
Hearing of the case will be open again on May 8 stating that EaseMyTrip was sent a cease and desist notice in September by MakeMyTrip company to stop it immediately, but the company did not respond instead continued using the ‘makemytrip’ ad-word.
For the fiscal year ending March 2018, MakeMyTrip throughput generated is Rs.2759 crores, and it spent nearly Rs.3320 crore for promoting its brand. Due to this, the company feels unjust and imposed a fine on Google as well.
