Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt warns that the NSA is about to destroy the Internet

The question must be asked…is their anything that this Obama administration will not destroy? Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Ukraine, the E.U., Ebola, the U.S. border with Mexico, American healthcare, privacy and now even the Internet.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt warned at an event in California on Wednesday that the Internet will soon undergo massive upheaval if governments refuse to alter the way they spy on other countries…he means the way the NSA spies on everyone.
Schmidt noted that the Internet will splinter into walled-off fragments unless digital surveillance practices of the National Security Agency and foreign intelligence agencies are reformed.

“The simplest outcome is that we’re going to end up breaking the Internet,” Schmidt said. “Because what’s going to happen is, governments will do bad laws of one kind or another, and they are eventually going to say, ‘We want our own Internet in our country because we want it to work our way, right? And we don’t want these NSA and other people in it.'”
“The cost of that is huge,” Schmidt added. “The impact … is severe and getting worse.”

The National Journal reports:

As an example of the potential for digital fragmentation across borders, Schmidt highlighted Germany’s decision this summer to end a contract with Verizon because of revelations regarding the NSA’s bulk collection of millions of phone records.
Schmidt was joined by other executives from large tech companies on a panel discussing the economic ramifications of the U.S. government’s sweeping surveillance practices, which came under intense scrutiny following the leaks by Edward Snowden last summer. Others agreed with Schmidt’s foreboding prognosis of the future of the Internet absent radical changes in digital surveillance.
“The notion that you would have to place data centers that serve communities within [that] region is fundamentally at odds” with the design of the Internet, said Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch. In such a scenario, countries would elect to store data on local servers, where it would be inaccessible to the international Internet community.
American tech companies have long cautioned the U.S. government that their global competitiveness is being crippled because of eroding mistrust among their users, who fear that data may not be safe from intelligence agencies.

Two more years of Obama…more than enough time to completely screw up the Internet.
References:
http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/google-chairman-we-re-going-to-end-up-breaking-the-internet-20141008