One concern, though, is that since it is a “special” name of a stdlib package that is EoL from its previous owners, awarding the canonical name to someone does put the PyPI maintainers in the position of de-facto having to pick who gets to be the maintainer of the module going forward, which is a lot of power and responsibility to put in any one person’s hands. This is particularly the case for a project owned by a single maintainer (hosted on a site that, AFAIK and I may be wrong, doesn’t really have a mechanism to easily allow otherwise, and somewhat lacking in modern collaboration mechanisms), as opposed to a community project founded by a number of interested stakeholders.
Maybe PyPI itself could PEP 541 request it and remove it (since the name should revert to PyPI’s ownership, being on the blocklist)? It only had two releases, 0.0.1 and 0.0.2 both on the same day in 2009, and the homepage link is blocked on my browser as a malware site. Checking it on PyPIstats, it has 40k downloads per month, but essentially 100% of those are likely by mistake as overwhelming majority (all but a few dozen per day) are for Python 3, whereas the package was released just after Python 3.0 came out (and before Python 3.1 and 2.7, even), and the setup.py contains Python 2-only syntax. Furthermore, AFAIK it won’t actually work anyway because the stdlib module will shadow it.