That's not even part of import. import is done when it has [name1, name2, name3]. It's ceval.c that does the binding.

Sounds to me like you want to override __setitem__ on the module's __dict__.

Tricky, 'cause a module is hardly in charge of its own __dict__.

But if you see value in it, you'd better persue it now, because Jeremy's plans for optimization of module __dict__ will likely make things harder.