I think this is the right choice because in practice UTF-8 "won" just like how the two's complement machine integer won. It's pretty good, Wikipedia has a brief section explaining how Ken Thompson for example made it self-synchronizing, which seems like a "duh" feature today but the concept before Ken touched it didn't have this. It's a Best Common Practice for the Internet, it's the default in most modern systems and places such as Java's virtual machine or Windows which can't easily "just" use UTF-8 have nevertheless gradually shifted toward being very friendly toward it.
