The reason for the observed error is explained in Central 501 HTTPS Required
Effective January 15, 2020, The Central Repository no longer supports
insecure communication over plain HTTP and requires that all requests
to the repository are encrypted over HTTPS.
It looks like latest versions of Maven (tried with 3.6.0, 3.6.1) are already using the HTTPS URL by default.
Here are the dates when the major repositories will switch:
Update: Seems like from maven 3.2.3 maven central is accessed via HTTPS
See https://stackoverflow.com/a/25411658/5820670
Maven Change log
(http://maven.apache.org/docs/3.2.3/release-notes.html)