7 Keys to the Internet?

James Ball at The Guardian has written a description of the Internet's "phone books" which sounds like a Philip K. Dick novel. An excerpt:

What these men and women control is the system at the heart of the web: the domain name system, or DNS. This is the internet's version of a telephone directory – a series of registers linking web addresses to a series of numbers, called IP addresses. Without these addresses, you would need to know a long sequence of numbers for every site you wanted to visit.