On the General Assembly, there's currently a discussion about how to enforce registrars' obligations, for instance as far as the procedure for transferring a domain name between two registrars is concerned.

Don Brown argues that registries who don't enforce their registrars' contracts with respect to transfers may be in breach of their own contracts with ICANN.

In a response, Vint Cerf writes:

the information I have seems to show that these specifics are in the contract between registrars and registry at least for the particular case of .com/.net/.org so ICANN does not have 3rd party standing to intervene for that case. The newer gTLD contracts are a bit more refined.

In response to Brown's question what contractual penalty gets the registry's attention, Cerf notes that it looks [t]o me as if we need something more refined than dis-accreditation as the principal tool providing incentive to adhere to contract terms.

Peter Dengate Thrush agrees, and so does Ross Rader, who points to an earlier discussion paper which suggests an adjudication process for commercial disputes, and a process of confirmation, referral, amendment, or denial of these adjudications by the Board of ICANN.