Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig epnic.net. NS
Answer
epnic.net. 2 NS dns1.epag.net.
epnic.net. 2 NS dns2.epag.net.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0