The problem with adding new APIs with different names to the JSON module is that it breaks symmetry with other wire protocols. The quartet of module level load, loads, dump and dumps functions has become a de facto standard API for wire protocols.

If it wasn't for that API convention, the status quo would be substantially less annoying (and confusing) than it currently is.

The advantage of a separate "jsonb" module is that it becomes easy to say "json is the text transform that dumps and loads from a Unicode string, jsonb is the wire protocol that dumps and loads a UTF encoded byte sequence".

Backporting as simplejsonb would also work in a straightforward fashion (since one PyPI package can include multiple top level Python modules).

The same approach would also extend to fixing the xmlrpc module to handle the encoding step properly (if anyone was so inclined).