TELEPRINTER: NICOLAS SARKOZY accurately predicted ahead of Sunday's first-round voting in the French presidential election that France's "outdated" election-day embargo would be broken. It wasn't just broken, it sustained multiple fractures.

The embargo, which prohibits the publishing of exit polls or partial results before all polling stations close, was duly ignored, not only by French social network users, who now potentially face criminal charges but by pretty much all of the media in neighbouring Belgium.

Belgian broadcaster RTBF received a record number of hits on Sunday, attracting 10 times more traffic than normal, as it ignored the embargo. Belgium’s French-language newspaper Le Soir was also inundated.

Despite the French president’s admission that the 1977 law is unworkable, authorities have launched an inquiry into the breaches and have included Belgian publishers in its investigation.

For its part, RTBF has responded that it operates under Belgian laws, not foreign ones, while Le Soir is busy modifying its site to cope with even greater hits on May 6th, the date of the election’s conclusive second round.

The French law, which is designed to prevent polling companies from influencing the outcome of the vote, came under serious pressure in the 2007 presidential election, when Belgian and Swiss sites crashed under the weight of curious French voters.

The rise of Twitter has made an even greater mockery of the embargo, especially given the practice of sensible users – hoping to avoid a fine – adopting amusing codes for the candidates when tweeting about the results.

“We can’t create a digital frontier between France and all the other countries in the world to prohibit others from communicating with France,” Sarkozy told Europe 1 radio last week. He’s far from being the only person to believe that embargoes of this kind are unenforceable in the age of digital media.