The axiom of countable choice and pointfree topology (Q5938998)

It is by now well known that the Tychonoff theorem, that arbitrary products of compact spaces are compact, may be proved without using the axiom of choice in `pointfree topology' (that is, in the category of locales), even though the theorem for traditional topological spaces is equivalent to the axiom of choice. The corresponding result with `Lindelöf' in place of `compact' is false in traditional topology, but turns out to be true at least for (completely) regular locales; so it was something of a surprise when G.~Schlitt showed that this result genuinely requires the axiom of countable choice. Schlitt conjectured that the `Lindelöf Tychonoff theorem' might actually be equivalent in ZF to the axiom of countable choice, but the present paper provides evidence that this may not be so: in fact, the assertion that arbitrary products of zero-dimensional Lindelöf locales are Lindelöf is equivalent to saying that either the axiom of countable choice holds or the discrete space of natural numbers is not Lindelöf (in which case all zero-dimensional Lindelöf locales are compact). A similar result for completely regular locales would follow if one could show that the non-Lindelöfness of the space of reals forces all Lindelöf locales to be compac.