Yes and no.

To you, in some contexts, the characters “example.org” identify a domain from the domain name system. However, from the URI spec viewpoint, netloc has the precise meaning of “machine to connect to to accomplish the rest of the URI role”. In other words, the URI spec does not call any sequence of characters that is a valid domain name a netloc. In schemes without a netloc part, the part after the colon is called a path, event if it contains a domain name (e.g. mailto:wok@example.org).

In your scheme-less example, the absence of “://” means that urlparse must assume there is no netloc part. Have you checked that the spec says we should assume an empty scheme (making urlparse right) or refuse to parse and bail?

Regards