> The weird thing about this to me is that phone numbers always take you to the same phone, but domain names just involve me trusting some table I use to look things up.

Not if I take my sim card and put it in another phone, or call my service provider to cancel my service and then they reuse the number for a new client.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but phone numbers, domain names, and ip addresses are all references that requiere looking up in some table (think routing tables for ip addresses and, I imagine, phone numbers).