This is a welcome, good and balanced response by ICANN to the WHOIS damage caused by GDPR.
The damage was not done by GDPR, it was done by ICANN as they insist on a centralized model despite different approaches were given. The major pitfall of the centralized approach is the assumption, that there could be a worldwide, consistent law for this purpose. Whois allows delegation of data to different servers under different jurisdictions, so each registrar can run a whois server in his own local law area and serve the registrants directly from there. Data collection on direct contracts are legal under local law, so no problem here. Then the registrar orders the domain from the registry, which in turn is a different contract, and can be handled by the registry whois server. This data collection (about the registar!) is legal, too. ICANN has contracts with registries to handle TLDs, which is operated by IANA. Consequently, if you ask whois.iana.org for anything, it will respond with the details of the contracted registry and a delegation to the registry whois server. This is well known to ICANN, but they decided to ignore all legal and lawful issue in order to please the law enforcement agencies (which are too lazy to fill out the legally required forms for data access), the IP property companies (which consider themselves as the private part of the LEAs), and the domain marketing industry (which likes bulk access for wet Big Data Dreams). So GDPR is not the cause of the problem. It only makes a long standing ignorance of ICANN public. So please do not shot the messenger. Thank you.