Just to add a little bit of historical perspective, this proposal is really more than seven years old:

"""
s.keim (Dec 20, 2002 3:33 am; Comment #13)

.. do we really need methods like utcnow. I believe the following could be a little more easy to learn:

* the module define an UTC tzinfo object

* the module define an UTC tzinfo object instead of utcfromtimestamp(x) and utcnow(), the user can use fromtimestamp(x, tzinfo=UTC) and now(tzinfo=UTC)
""" http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/SuggestedRequirements

Apparently, this proposal have been forgotten and reinvented again in msg106411, point 2.