Yes, you are definitely missing something. Flip the script and try to think about it in reverse. How would you like it if you currently had to use Chinese kanj

Yes, you are definitely missing something. Flip the script and try to think about it in reverse. How would you like it if you currently had to use Chinese kanji ideographs to enter domain names? There would be no 'hackernews.com'. Instead, you would have to input something like '黒客新聞.網' If you wanted to have a blog with your name, you'd need to translate your name into kanji characters and register that--no lowglow.com or anything like that. Even if you learned some kanji so you could browse to this site, and use the kanji-based Internet (and we all would learn us some kanji, if somehow that was the only way the Internet could be used) wouldn't you find that annoying? But that is exactly the kind of thing that the hundreds of millions of users whose native writing systems don't map to roman letters have had to put up with. I write in a few languages, including Japanese. So I remember the old days 15-20 years ago when you had to install a 'language kit' just to open a text file in certain non-English languages. Thankfully, all major modern operating systems have evolved beyond that. It is good and appropriate for Internet domain names to also evolve beyond the primitive limitations of yesteryear that no longer have any technical reason to exist. (Also, as an aside, you do not need a special keyboard to type those characters, modern operating systems have input method software that lets you compose text in virtually any language regardless of what type of keyboard you have.)