Schmidt's remarks came as part of an on-stage interview he gave with Box CEO Aaron Levie at today's BoxDev conference, where the newly-public cloud storage company is making its case to 2,400 developers. 

Levie and Schmidt were discussing the importance of a free and open Internet, as well as the contrasts between the Internet in America and elsewhere. 

Schmidt described North Korea as a kind of worst-case scenario, where the current regime has almost totally blocked itself off from the global Internet, creating a kind of "intranet" where you can access a lot of state-approved content, and not much else.