Of course it's parochial. The very name is United States-American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is an antique standard for teletype machines tha

Of course it's parochial. The very name is United States-American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is an antique standard for teletype machines that can still be read and decoded by everything on the planet. It is as close to universal as anything we have. There is a reason that the first 128 decimal code characters in UTF-8 are US-ASCII...