Some of the controversy stems from the fact that the very decision of performing Han unification was made by the initial Unicode Consortium, which at the time was a consortium of North American companies and organizations (most of them in California), but included no East Asian government representatives. The initial design goal was to create a 16-bit standard, and Han unification was therefore a critical step for avoiding tens of thousands of character duplications. This 16-bit requirement was later abandoned, making the size of the character set less of an issue today.