"His position is basically a pro-business position"
What utter nonsense. Being ignorant of the facts and making vague claims of protecting economic interests can only be described as a "pro-getting-paid position".
You can speciously misrepresent and mislabel things all you want. No one can predict the long term outcome of these kinds of bills. It's informed guessing at best, wilfully blind money-making at worst.
It's telling that this bill is sponsored by Lamar Smith (R-TX). He was also one of the most steadfast sponsors of SOPA. These guys are just hired goons.
UTF-8 strings ARE byte arrays -- just with some extra semantics for certain operations. Many operations don't even need to be aware of anything besides the raw array of bytes.
C# has the worst-of-all-worlds approach and seems to cling to the specious notion that you can just "index" the "characters". In reality, you can't reliably index without the risk of splitting surrogate pairs and the notion that UTF-16 is an "array of characters" is completely false at all levels. The memory representation may be "abstracted", but it's not even a leaky abstraction, it's a historical accident and a complete broken abstraction.
Beware of believing what Microsoft say about C# string handling -- they're stuck with UTF-16, whether they like it or not.
Explaining it as "basically a way to XYZ" doesn't make it any more agreeable. Stealing your wallet is "basically a way for me to get some easy money" -- so f*cking what?
ECMAScript Harmony is just another design-by-committee disaster that's eerily similar to how C++ came about. I would say that it'll "ruin JavaScript", but that'd be implying the false premise that JavaScript was ever any good.