Google Inc on Thursday confirmed that an executive behind leading mobile device software Android is leaving the company to create an incubator for hardware startups.
Andy Rubin became a Google executive in 2005 when the Internet titan bought Android Inc, which was then a small startup that Rubin cofounded two years earlier.
Rubin led the Android team at Google until last year, by which time Android was the most widely used smartphone operating system in the world.
Rubin switched to managing the robotics team at Google.
“I want to wish Andy all the best with what’s next,” Google chief executive Larry Page said in an e-mail statement.
“With Android he created something truly remarkable with a billion plus happy users. Thank you,” Page wrote.
SPAIN VS GOOGLE
Separately, Spanish lawmakers annoyed Google on Thursday by passing a law that allows media organizations to charge the Internet giant for the right to reproduce their news content.
The US search engine had threatened to shut down its Google News page in Spain if the measures were passed, but the Spanish parliament approved them in a vote on Thursday.
The government hailed the move, saying the measures, part of a new intellectual property law, “recognize the right of publishing companies and news producers to be paid for the use of their content.”
Google responded in a statement: “We are disappointed with the new law because we think services like Google News help publishers to draw traffic to their websites.”
“We will continue working with Spanish publishers to help them increase their revenues while examining our options under the new regulations,” it said.
The law has been dubbed the “Google tax” in Spain, but it would also apply to other big Web companies with pages that reproduce and link to news content, such as Yahoo.
The government said in its statement on Thursday that social networks such as Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc “are not subject” to the law.
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