Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig msft.net. NS
Answer
msft.net. 5 NS ns3-205.azure-dns.org.
msft.net. 5 NS ns2-205.azure-dns.net.
msft.net. 5 NS ns1-205.azure-dns.com.
msft.net. 5 NS ns4-205.azure-dns.info.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0