If you look at https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/importlib/_bootstrap.py and https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Lib/importlib/_bootstrap_external.py you will notice a bunch of comments near all the calls to load_module(). Those are the places that should be somehow triggering a DeprecationWarning. I think there's a compatibility shim function which would need to raise an exception so that anyone who has implemented load_module() as the only way to handle loading get a warning (but I think that requires certain loaders to have appropriate support which hopefully they have already but someone needs to double-check). After that every implementation of load_module() should have a warning.