and i find it fair that American characters require 2 bytes in Java as everybody else, not 1 as in utf-8! :)
[1] "Latin characters" is the proper term, not "American characters"
anyway, i think that even if Latin chars weren't the most used in the world, it would be fair to keep them the primary charset for use in programming and markup languages, as no-one now complains that the international language of medicine is Latin, not, say, Chinese :) as computers started to be massively developed in America.