You can't really compare .asia with any other domain extensions. .Asia is a generiic extension, and .eu is not. The current list of generic extensions are: .Asia, .com, net, .org, .us, .info .mobi and .biz. All of the other extensions are country-specific. This is the first new generic extension in many many years.
This is great news for Asia because they have not been able to efficiently enter the internet because there are no more generic extensions available. Since ICANN only accepts domain names in English letters, all of the old Asian website names didn’t make any sense, nor could you ever remember the name. Essentially Asia has been shut out from the internet because ICANN has been slow to move.
For example; if you do a search on google in the Chinese language for "Buy Cars", which the search phrase would be " 买车 " , it brings up many listings on Google, but if you notice the actual website names, a lot of them don't make any sense. Note the following website names on the Chinese search for "buy cars":
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search
Since they have no English domain names to choose from, this means nobody can ever remember how to find their Asian sites again. It's not the Asian governments that have keep Asia from the Web, it has actually been ICANN.