Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig as201971.net. NS
Answer
as201971.net. 4 NS rick.ns.cloudflare.com.
as201971.net. 4 NS jule.ns.cloudflare.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0