Actually, this block of tests may be outdated. Reading the comment above the list of (URIs, is_ftp) doubles makes you see that it was testing the automatic use of FTP in some file: URIs, a very dubious behavior that is now removed or deprecated. Senthil, I think a little cleanup is needed.
Committed for py3k in r87895. Yup, could have been assertIs as well. The reason for the change is that "is" failed on PyPy. This should be backported to Python 2.7 as well.