Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig alker.net. NS
Answer
alker.net. 5 NS bradley.ns.cloudflare.com.
alker.net. 5 NS brynne.ns.cloudflare.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0