How Net Works:

One of the greatest things about the Internet is that nobody really owns it. It is a global collection of networks, both big and small. These networks connect together in many different ways to form the single entity that we know as the Internet. In fact, the very name comes from this idea of interconnected networks.
The first thing your browser has to do is to establish a network connection to the machine where the document lives. To do that, it first has to find the network location of the host web site. The corresponding location is actually a number called an IP address.