Contact governance is most comfortable at the extremes. When a signal is obviously noise, disposal is easy. When it is unquestionably real and institutional consensus exists, custody can formalize around a known path. The dangerous interval sits in between.
That interval begins when the event looks too credible to ignore but not yet stable enough to assign permanent authority. At that point, every serious actor has a reason to want custody. Technical teams want access for continued analysis. Governments want control for disclosure and security reasons. Review structures want the right to slow everything down. Machine witnesses want preserved context before simplification begins.
The problem is not merely competition. It is the fact that custody itself starts to shape the event. The first institution to own the canonical copy can influence timing, interpretation, and public meaning even if it never sends a reply.
That is why early-contact governance increasingly treats custody as a temporary constitutional problem rather than a storage problem. The hardest step is not keeping the signal safe. It is keeping the institutions around it procedurally honest while it remains in play.