Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig cnet.com. NS
Answer
cnet.com. 3 NS ns-cloud-a2.googledomains.com.
cnet.com. 3 NS ns-cloud-a1.googledomains.com.
cnet.com. 3 NS ns-cloud-a4.googledomains.com.
cnet.com. 3 NS ns-cloud-a3.googledomains.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0