While python 3 now has decent native support for HTTP(S) with it's urllib module (which does cover 99+% of my use cases), PyCurl supports "FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS, FILE, IMAP, SMTP, POP3 and RTSP. libcurl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, Kerberos4), file transfer resume, http proxy tunneling and more!" -- pycurl.io/

So it can solves those edge cases. It may also be useful if you hit performance or memory usage issues in your python based search spider or similar massively parallel connection applications.