If anything Snowden himself has and will accelerate the erosion he fears.
Even if the UK, France, Germany, etc. can somehow assume that NSA will stop (which is laughable, but let's assume it), they still will have to deal with a resurgent Russia, Iran, and China.
Whatever methods can protect them from China can protect them from NSA, and vice versa. If anything they've been trying for a long time to put up "cyber borders" but policymakers have blown it off as unnecessary when it's just a matter of cyber crime.
Now that Snowden has opened up peoples eyes to the possibilities (quite forcefully, I might add), there is now political cover to build those cyber walls, only under the guise of "blocking the NSA" instead of blocking Chinese hackers.
You're right that this has been obvious too. There are no commons that are not regulated by the nations, and militarized when and if they become a threat. Antarctica is only left alone because it's unimportant. The Arctic is a growing strategic concern, and space itself is only a step away from being militarized.
If the U.S. cannot gain strategic value from cyberspace they will certainly not leave it open as a strategic weakness dragging along a "PLEASE HACK ME" sign, and a similar calculus applies to all of the democracies. Whether it's borders, or a national Internet kill switch, or both or more I don't know, but it won't be the same as it was before.
I wouldn't really agree that Antarctica is "left alone".
Antarctica is protected by international treaty but nations are populating it with "research" missions so they have a presence when that treaty is renegotiated. The continent has massive untapped natural resources.
Internet borders and national kill switches are like killing a mosquito with an H-bomb. There are far more surgical options for defending against cyberattacks, and instead of trying to sound sage by predicting doom and gloom (and claiming we knew it all along), we should be implementing and advocating these more appropriate approaches.
> There are far more surgical options for defending against cyberattacks
We still can't even get our coders to stop using C for security-critical code, and you could effectively throw C++ in that complaint bin too. We can't get people to implement crypto appropriately. The list goes on and on. And with cybersecurity you only have to get one thing wrong, especially on an open Internet, while the attacker gets effectively unlimited time and numbers of attempts (although they don't even need that so far, as long as 0-days can be bought off the shelf).
And all the stuff we can't do in the civilian sector, it's even harder to do right in government and military (and apparently critical industry). There's a whole host of things we can do to be better, but half the reason walls will go up is because they are so much better at dealing with novel threats than the idea of "just design and implement everything perfectly, geez".
But either way, Germany's complaint wasn't just cyberattacks. There was also data privacy, and that complaint is centered entirely around the fact that they can't control whether a German's data gets routed to France, UK, etc. even in the course of entirely .de <-> .de Internet traffic.
But the roots are already here, it's not simply a prediction. After the 2007 Russian cyberattack on Estonia, Estonia was able to adapt and recover very effectively... but they still now have a national cyberborder in place, and are just waiting to hit the button (a useful button to have right now, given the crises in the Crimea).
Ironically things like open source will only make this trend easier I think. It's not hard to imagine governments setting up things like ownCloud with a federated model, with replication channels open to friendly nations' instances of ownCloud and closed otherwise.
or that first world democracies would have actually stood up for the combined good of people everywhere rather than just asserting their own narrow organisational goals.
I'd say the First World businesses, although more indirectly. See the "structural adjustment packages" we impose to enslave those countries (devaluing money, favouring exportation…).
Anyone who thought that the internet wasn't going to have state actors and control, also must think that the internet would never be important.