I'd love if something like requests was included along with Python. But requests uses urllib3, so it's not like you could get rid of that. The main page for requests says they're working on a v3...you wouldn't want that kind of churn in the stdlib. Personally, I kind of like the structure of low-level libraries and fancier high-level libraries I use most often.

So I'm not quite sure what is the best thing to do. It sounds like requests III is a Python3 forward version. So it might make sense to ship that?

Python has decided to include packages developed outside of the stdlib before; I think json, pathlib, and maybe optparse.