Does this mean we're going to have Python 2 installed on things forever? (Particularly anything that touches NNTP servers, as there's no replacement for that lib)
If it's simple, then what's the point in removing it? Dealing with standard application level protocols like SMTP, NNTP, FTP, IMAP, POP, and HTTP shouldn't require installing third party packages.
So that they can be improved / maintained. "stdlib is where packages go to die" is kind of true. You can use contact http from stdlib for example, but that's how we get urllib, urllib2, 3rd party urllib3 and requests.
For the point of removing the modules, check the "rationale" part of the PEP.
The original post you responded to mentioned that NNTP did not have a replacement, so I don't see how it could be improved/maintained if it's just not there anymore.
