El or La? Who decides?

I am, for about the 20th time in my life, learning Spanish. I decided to go the vocabulary route this time and got myself a box of flash cards. One of the things I learned is that e-mail is el correro electronico. I've no problem with that, although I really should be shortened to el-C, maybe, in good old American tradition. This is obviously a new word, since e-mail isn't that old. It's masculine (el), I assume, because correro is masculine. So far, so good. But what happens if a noun comes into Spanish that isn't built on a previous noun. Let's say that a word has to be invented for something -- oh, I don't know -- a flist. Would it be el flisto or la flista? The chances are that the item, whatever it is, is neither male nor female, so the choice of grammatical gender is completely open.
I have two questions: First, who decides? Is there a committee set up somewhere that decides, for all Spanish-speaking peoples, what the gender of a noun will be? Second, what are the criteria? Does this committee sit around and debate the issue, with a round of balloting to see what's going to happen?
Here my American language chauvinism shows itself. English got rid of grammatical gender, by and large, 8 or 9 hundred years ago. It's about time Spanish did the same. Then I wouldn't have to learn all those el's and la's.