I remember a discussion about this years ago.
urllib is a module that pre-dates the idea of universal parsing for URIs, where the delimiters (like ://) are enough to determine the parts of a URI and give them meaning (host, port, user, path, etc).
Backward compat for urllib is always a concern; someone said at the time that it could be good to have a new module for modern, generic parsing, but that hasn’t happened. Maybe a new parse function, or new parameter to the existing one, could be easier to add.