That simply not true. The EU data protection Working Party (Article 29 aka. WP29) has being telling them since 2003 that Whois is not compatible with EU law [0]. That's well over a decade.

Even if ICANN only took GDPR seriously, their plan A was awful and their plan B was non-existent, see the thread further up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081950

[0] http://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinion...