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