Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig appliedi.net. NS
Answer
appliedi.net. 5 NS dns3.appliedi.net.
appliedi.net. 5 NS dns2.appliedi.net.
appliedi.net. 5 NS dns1.appliedi.net.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
dns1.appliedi.net. 5 A 174.136.64.3
dns2.appliedi.net. 5 A 174.136.72.51
dns3.appliedi.net. 5 A 216.167.207.18
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0