> In the past, they encouraged an honour system through the use of WDRP emails. In addition, they only acted or required registrars to act when an issue was reported or noticed. I guess you could call this passive enforcement.
In practice for anyone who isn't a wrongdoer this is also known as non-enforcement. Nobody would normally notice or care when a website operated by an innocent person has inaccurate whois data or uses a whois privacy service that will actually keep the registrant's personal information private.
You're wrong there. I know that, because unlike you, I work for a domain registrar. And let me tell you something. There are actually people there who purposely trawl WHOIS looking for invalid data, just so that they can submit WHOIS inaccuracy reports to ICANN. The ICANN compliance department is far from underworked. You should talk to some of their staff some time.
Who are they and why would they do that to innocent people?
Perhaps more importantly, how can they even tell when the data is inaccurate? I have a hard time believing that domain contacts are inclined to respond to unsolicited unprovoked third party "offers" to verify their address. Hi, can you let me know that someone is reading this so I can start sending you an unending stream of spam? Meanwhile just because you have a third party whois privacy service doesn't mean they don't faithfully forward your mail.
In practice for anyone who isn't a wrongdoer this is also known as non-enforcement. Nobody would normally notice or care when a website operated by an innocent person has inaccurate whois data or uses a whois privacy service that will actually keep the registrant's personal information private.