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